BUTTERIES. 



EARLY in March, and often while the snow yet lingers 

 upon the landscape, may be seen flying in and out 

 among the forest-trees, or lazily meandering along some 

 deserted road through a thicket, the beautiful Antiopa. Her 

 rich crimson dress, so dark that it almost seems black, with 

 its buff-colored, sky-dotted border, serves to distinguish her 

 from her no less interesting, but smaller, sisters of the Vanessa 

 family of butterflies. But the Antiopas you then see are 

 generally ragged and shabby, which is not to be wondered 

 at, when it is considered that it is their last year's dresses 

 they wear, for late in the preceding August they had their 

 being, and all through the autumn had been exposed to a 

 hundred misfortunes or more while seeking their living. 



But with the coming of frost and of cold comes the blight- 

 ing of flowers. A feeling of torpor in consequence steals over 

 their once bouyant spirits, and into some crevice in a barn 

 or a wood-pile or stone-heap they creep, and there sleep the 

 winter away, till the warmth of the sun from his southward- 

 bound journey returning sets the brown buds a-swelling, 

 when out of their hibernating retreats they leisurely crawl for 

 a flying stroll through the awakening trees. Slow and 

 deliberate their movements are, as though some grave and 

 momentous event were dependent thereon. 



Never have I watched such actions, so human-like have 

 they seemed, than the conviction has gone home to my mind 

 that they plainly evinced a thought and a purpose, which 

 had their origin, if not in a brain, at least in one of the sev- 

 eral ganglions which largely make up their wonderful and 

 somewhat complicated nervous machinery. 



