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Once more the singing of the birds and the hum of the insect-world fell soothingly upon my ears; and there, as before, sat the pretty doves, still repeating their soft "co-co-a" the endearing expression of their loves. I could have lingered long in the midst of this fair scene long have enjoyed its sylvan beauty; but the intellectual must over yield to the physical.
No whirring wings rush past; there is no sound of "dragon-fly, or painted moth, or musical winged bee" to break the stillness; all the insect-world seems dead, or flown south with the swallows though, as there are still spiders' webs to be seen, each delicate thread marked in sharp outline, like the rigging of an icebound ship, it would seem that there must still remain some unwary fly to be taken in the beautiful snare.
The next was the failure of the wind; a stark breathless calm having fallen upon the face of nature like a pall, in the which not so much as a single leaf stirred; and the whole insect-world, contrary to its usual custom, awaiting in hushed expectancy the outburst of the coming storm, a great and death-like silence prevailed, through which the slightest sound which we might accidentally make would have been heard for a long distance.
By the aid of his friendly light, for which he was really much obliged a fact which, had his little friend known, he would not have left it he managed to make the circuit of his prison, which he found rather spacious, and by no means uninhabited; for the walls and floor were covered with fat, black beetles, whole families of which interesting specimens of the insect-world he crunched remorselessly under foot, and massacred at every step; and great, depraved-looking rats, with flashing eyes and sinister-teeth, who made frantic dives and rushes at him, and bit at his jack-boots with fierce, fury.
They are the humming-birds of the insect-world, the Chrysis-wasps, or Golden Wasps, another set of exterminators of the larvae overcome with lethargy in their cocoons. In them, the atrocious assassin of cradled children lies hidden under the splendour of the garb.
In fact, the law which we have shown to exist with regard to the ox and the lion, rules also over the insect-world; and whilst a radical change seems to have been made in the rest of the organisation, here everything is in its place, and we find ourselves in the same system.
We know exactly how far he can go; and we have invariably found that our efforts, our patience, our encouragement, our passionate appeals, have hitherto failed to draw him out of the somewhat narrow, darkly enchanted circle wherein nature seems to have imprisoned him once and for all. There remains, it is true, the insect-world, in which marvellous things happen.
Then, indeed, the silence became weird, oppressive, uncanny; making one involuntarily shuffle nearer to one's neighbour and glance half-fearfully over one's shoulder. Then, after a slight interval, a faint, far-off signal chirp! chirp! would be heard, and in an instant the whole insect-world would burst into full chorus once more, and the air would fairly vibrate with sound.
The most important event of the insect-world in the Tertiary is the arrival of the butterflies, which then appear for the first time. We may assume that they spread with great rapidity and abundance in the rich floral world of the mid-Jurassic. More than 13,000 species of Lepidoptera are known to-day, and there are probably twice that number yet to be classified by the entomologist.
My favorite studies of the insect-world seemed to have lost their value in my estimation. In the silence and the darkness I lay down under a tree, and let my mind dwell on myself and on my new life to come. I am Gerard Roylake, son and only child of the late Gerard Roylake of Trimley Deen. At twenty-two years of age, my father's death had placed me in possession of his large landed property.
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