BEAUTIFUL HAWK-MOTHS 223 



and created in our infantile minds an indescribable 

 impression of glory, brilliance, aloofness, elusive- 

 ness. We thought it a being from some other 

 world, and during each of its frequent sudden 

 disappearances among the flowering bushes we 

 held our breath, fearing it would return no more, 

 but had flown right through the blossoming screen 

 and back to the sun and stars. To me it was an 

 apparition of inexpressible delight, and I longed 

 to be a Merrylee-dance-a-pole myself to fly to 

 unheard-of, unthought-of, undreamed-of beautiful 

 flowery lands." 



A descriptive passage this by one who is not 

 a literary person, a student of expression anxiously 

 seeking after the " explicit word," yet an expres- 

 sion rare and beautiful as the thing described : one 

 reads it with a quickened pulse. Who should 

 dream of finding its like anywhere in the thousand 

 books of British Butterflies and Moths which our 

 exceedingly industrious lepidopterists have pro- 

 duced during the last six or seven decades ? Yet 

 these same thousand volumes were written less for 

 the scientific student of entomology than for the 

 general reader, or for every person who on seeing 

 a white admiral or a privet moth wants to know 

 what it is and goes to a book to find out all about 

 it. These writers all fail in the very thing which 

 one would imagine to be most important in books 

 intended for such a purpose — the power to convey 

 to the reader's mind a vivid image of the thing 

 described. One would like to know what the 



