120 STARLIGHT AND SUNSAINE. 
barrack roofs, slowly stealing down the shingle or hovering in 
impending avalanche at the dripping eaves. High on the ridge- 
pole of the barn my butterfly first disclosed itself, now flutter- 
ing against the sky, now alighting with expanded, gently moving 
wings, sipping at the steamy edge of the snow, or sailing across 
its white field. How I sighed to bag the prize! What yearn- 
ings and heart-throbs, wondrous stratagems of allurement, and 
superhuman schemes of capture! what hopes and fears animated 
my demoralized being as I watched the sportive antics of the 
sprite, as in turn it circled close to the eaves among the swallow- 
nests or disappeared behind the peak or gable! What a marvel- 
lous account of this strange visitor could I have given had not 
prosaic fortune at last permitted its identification ! 
An event like this is a perpetual spring to the spirit. How 
often through the years have I drank therefrom and been re- 
freshed! But in my present mood the incident recurs with a new 
significance. That enrapturing butterfly happily is still free, but 
a similar one since captured proved to be a species familiar in my 
cabinet — the aztzopa, the same that fluttered among the winter 
mosses of the “Old Manse” of Hawthorne. ‘“ Rare butterflies,” 
he writes, “came before the snow was off, flaunting in the chill 
breeze and looking forlorn and all astray, in spite of all the mag- 
nificence of their dark velvet cloaks with golden borders.” In 
this “lone butterfly” of the winter sun, as Wilson mistakenly 
calls it, we have a representative of a small family of beautiful 
insects for which the cold has no terrors; for it is not true, as 
the poet of “the butterfly” would have us believe, that 
“each gay little rover 
Shrinks from the breath of the first autumn day” ; 
nor, as Shakespeare implied in the lines— 
“Men, like butterflies, 
Show not their mealy wings but to the summer”; 
