HIBERNATING BUTTERFLIES. 
ARLY 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 buffcolored, 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. 
