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She seemed to see her lover and herself setting forth silently along the river wall where they had first met; sitting down, still silent, beneath the poplar-tree where the little bodies of the chafers had lain strewn in the Spring.
But Edward was made of different stuff. He went to work again as zealously as ever, and in four years more, he had got most of the beetles, flies, and chafers as carefully collected as before. By the year 1845, Edward had gathered together about two thousand specimens of beasts, birds, and insects found in the neighbourhood of his own town of Banff.
From the wood moths and chafers flew to the lamp, and, fluttering round it, fell on to the table, slowly dying there a fiery death. Yourii, as he pitied their fate, thought to himself: "We, too, like insects, rush to the flame, and flutter round every luminous idea only to perish miserably at the last.
The bees rush past, and the resolute wasps; the humble-bees, whose weight swings them along. About the oaks and maples the brown chafers swarm, and the fern-owls at dusk, and the blackbirds and jays by day, cannot reduce their legions while they last. Yellow butterflies, and white, broad red admirals, and sweet blues; think of the kingdom of flowers which is theirs!
I own to a boyish pleasure in seeing the clouds of brown chafers in early summer clustering 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 himself 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 song of birds, the hum of chafers and bees, the whisper of leaves, and all the rush and rustle of the forest were its mother-tongue. Yet, not so!
That country, on the other hand, has developed a variety of flower-haunting Chafers and Buprestidae, and numbers of large and curious terrestrial Weevils, scarcely any of which are adapted to the damp gloomy forests of New Guinea, where entirely different forms are to be found.
There was no moon, no stars, no wind; the cattle were noiseless under the trees; there were no owls calling, no night-jars churring, the fly-by-night chafers were not abroad. The stream alone was alive in the quiet darkness.
How very miserable! 'She has no feelers! cried another. 'How ugly she is! said all the lady chafers and yet Thumbelina was really very pretty. The cockchafer who had stolen her knew this very well; but when he heard all the ladies saying she was ugly, he began to think so too, and would not keep her; she might go wherever she liked. So he flew down from the tree with her and put her on a daisy.
Neither the chafers, the toads, nor the earth-worms, whom they asked about it could give them any information none of them had been boiled or laid on a silver dish. The old white snails were the first persons of distinction in the world, that they knew; the forest was planted for their sake, and the manor-house was there that they might be boiled and laid on a silver dish.
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