THE MAKERS OF SUMMER. (227 
Sometimes I think insects smell the approaching 
observer as the deer wind the stalker. The Gatekeeper 
butterfly is common; its marking is very ingenious, 
may I say? regular, and yet irregular. The pattern is 
complete, and yet it is incomplete ; it is finished, and yet 
it suggests to the mind that the lines ought to go on 
farther. They go out into space beyond the wing. If 
a carpet were copied from it, and laid down in a room, 
the design would want to run through the walls. 
Imagine the flower-bird’s wing detached from some 
immense unseen carpet and set floating—it is a piece of 
something not ended in itself, and yet floating about 
complete. Some of their wings are neatly cut to an 
edge and bordered ; of some the edge is lost in colour, 
because no line is drawn along it. Some secm to have 
ragged edges naturally, and look as if they had been 
battered. Towards the end of their lives little bits of 
the wing drop out, as if punched. The markings on the 
under wings have a tendency to run into arches, one 
arch above the other. The tendency to curve may be 
traced everywhere in things as wide apart as a flower- 
bird’s wing and the lincs on a scallop-shell. 
I own to a boyish pleasure in seeing the clouds of 
brown chafers in early summer clustcring on the maple 
hedges and keeping up a continual burring. They stick 
to the fingers like the bud of a horse-chestnut. Now 
the fern owl pitches himsclf over the oaks in the evening 
as a boy might throw a ball careless whither it goes ; 
the next moment he comes up out of the earth under 
your feet. The night cuckoo might make another of his 
many names ; his colour, ways, and food are all cuckoo- 
like; so, too, his immense gape—a cave in which end- 
less moths end their lives; the eggs are laid on the 
ground, for there is no night-fecding bird into. whose 
Q2 
