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34 STARLIGHT AND SUNSHINE. 
only their long bodies visible in the fuzzy, buzzy halos of wings, 
the slender capillary tongues uncoiled, nearly six inches in length, 
and thrust in turn deep into the honeyed tubes. 
The honeysuckle bush was a favorite twilight haunt in those 
memorable early years of my entomological fervor. One single 
evening I remember bringing to my net over thirty specimens, 
great and smal!. What a strange fascination they always had 
for me, with their great bulging eyes, their grotesque shape, their 
mysterious flight, and queer exotic look generally —as unlike the 
creatures of the sunshine as though from the Stygian world. 
Indeed, my first specimen could not have amazed me more had 
I bagged a chimera fresh from the moon, for these sphinx-moths 
are hid from the sharpest eyes by day; protégés of gray rocks 
and fences, or merged in the fissured bark of trees, eluding the 
most careful search, their frequent glowing color now smoulder- 
ing beneath the ashes of their upper wings, from which they rise 
like a phceenix in the dusk. These moths are mostly dressed in 
sombre colors, but some of them bear the aureate hues of the 
sunset on their wings, others are black as night, or painted with 
olives dark as the midnight trees, and one there is lit with the 
rosy tints of dawn, as though thus to typify in their motley the 
sombre interval of their animated being. Who that has wit- 
nessed this revelation among the honeysuckles could be any 
longer insensible to the vital interdependence between this blos- 
som and the moth? 
Most of the nocturnal flowers have thus adapted themselves 
especially to these long-tongued Lepidoptera, hiding their honey 
'in such deep tubes or spurs that it is only accessible to the 
hawk-moths. To these, then, is intrusted the perpetuity of many 
night-flowering plants. 
In attributing a phosphorescent quality to the evening prim- 
rose I have mainly followed the license of fancy, although, if the 
scientists are to be believed, I have indeed scarcely wandered 
from the literal truth. For the singular luminous glow of this 
and other nocturnal flowers has long attracted the attention of 
the curious, and positive qualities of inherent light have been 
