THE MAKERS OF SUMMER. 225 
he isa friend. I have always Ict them build about the 
house, and shall not drive them away. 
If you do not know anything of insects, the fields 
are somewhat barren to you. The buttercups are beau- 
tiful, still they are buttercups every day. The thrush’s 
song is lovely, still one cannot always listen to the 
thrush. The fields are but large open spaccs after a 
time to many, unless they know a little of insects, when 
at once they become populous, and there is a link found 
between the birds and the flowers. It is like opening 
another book of endless pages, and coloured illustrations 
on every page. 
Blessings on the man, said Sancho Panza, who first 
invented sleep. Blessings on the man who first invented 
the scarlet geranium, and thereby brought the Humming- 
bird moth to the window-sill ; for, though seen ever so 
often, I can always watch it again hovering over the 
petals and taking the honey, and away again into the 
bright sunlight. Sometimes, when walking along, and 
thinking of everything else but it, the beautiful Peacock 
butterfly suddenly floats by the face like a visitor from 
another world, so highly coloured, and so original and 
unlike and unexpected. In bright painters’ work like 
the wings of butterflies, which often have distinct hucs 
side by side, I think nature puts very little green ; the 
bouquet is not backed with maiden-hair fern; the red 
and the blue and so on have no grass or leaves as a 
ground colour ; nor do they commonly alight on green, 
The bright colours are left to themselves unrclicved. 
None of the butterflies, I think, have green on the upper 
side of the wing ; the Green Hairstreak has green under 
wings, but green is not put forward. 
Something the same may be noticed in flowers 
themselves: the broad surface, for instance, of the 
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