222 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 
night and the moths’ strange motions and white- 
ness in the dark that gave it a magic on that 
occasion. Seen by daylight or lamplight it is Lord 
de Tabley’s “ owl-white moth with mealy wings,” 
or one of them, and nothing more. 
Moths are mostly haunters of the twilight and 
the dark, but we have one of the larger and highly 
distinguished species, the humming- bird hawk- 
moth, which flies abroad by day, even during the 
hottest seasons, and visits our gardens in the full 
blaze of noon. It has no glory of colour like the 
crimson underwing and death’s-head moth, nor 
ghostly white, yet it outshines all the others in 
beauty and in the sense of wonder and delight its 
appearance produces. Here I will quote part of a 
letter written to me some years ago by a lady who 
wanted to know if I could identify an insect she 
was particularly interested in, from her description. 
She had seen it when a child in the garden at her 
early home in Wiltshire, and never since, nor had 
she ever discovered what it was. 
“When I was a child,” the letter says, “I had 
a great fancy for a rare, strange, fascinating insect 
called by the children of my day the Merrylee- 
dance-a-pole. Only on the hottest and longest of 
summer days did the radiant being delight our 
eyes; to have seen it conferred high honour and 
distinction on the fortunate beholder. We re- 
garded it with mingled awe and joy, and followed 
its erratic and rapid flight with ecstasy. It was 
soft and warm and brown, fluffy and golden, too, 
