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I don't think he is a botanist, for he does not smell of dried herbs, but carries a camphorated atmosphere about with him, as if to keep the moths from attacking him. I must find out what is his particular interest. One ought to know something about his immediate neighbors at the table. This is what I said to myself, before opening a conversation with him.
They step with firmness and assurance, as if they knew where they wanted to go, and how to arrive. They are of direct swift flight, and much experience and dexterity are required to take them on wing. Both my Carolina moths emerged in late afternoon, about four o'clock, near the time their kind take flight to hunt for food.
At this hour, when it was blazing with hundreds of lights, the large opening, which by day admitted the bright sunshine, was closed over by a gold net-work, decorated with stars and a crescent moon of rock-crystal, and the meshes were close enough to exclude the bats and moths which at night always fly to the light.
Children peep into existence, suffer, and die; men play like moths about a candle, and sink into the flame; war, and "the thousand ills which flesh is heir to," mow them down in shoals; whilst the more cruel prejudices of society palsy existence, introducing not less sure though slower decay.
It was sadly torn off in places there were also several large holes in it indeed, if the truth be told, it was little more than a remnant of its once splendid entirety. It had been eaten by moths certain shrewd old wasps, too, had nested in it for years not a sou of it had vanished in speculation or bad investment.
You will find in the most out-of-the way villages human mollusks, creatures apparently dead, who have passions for lepidoptera or for conchology, let us say, beings who will give themselves infinite pains about moths, butterflies, or the concha Veneris.
But Frolic thought a fairy might possibly be found, and got into wild habits of running about in the moonlight, and barking a great deal at bats and night moths, fancying they were fairies; so that all the neighborhood complained, and begged the grandmother to shut the dog up evenings in the wood house; for though a pleasant animal by day, it was altogether too noisy by night.
I coaxed them in the warmth of closed palms I even laid them on dampened moss in the sun in the hope of softening the cases, and driving the moths out with the heat, but to no avail. They would not come forth. I had made my studies of the big moth, when she was fully developed; but to my despair, she was depositing worthless eggs over the inside of my screen door.
The antennæ, as with all butterflies, are clubbed at the extremity unlike moths', which are tapering and the large black staring eyes are the optical apparatus, containing, we are told, thousands of lenses, each a perfect, simple eye. The wings derive their chief coloring from the covering of scales, which lie on like slates on a roof, and are attached in a similar manner.
The Kumaon Cynthia cocoons, as I found it to be the case with Indian species introduced for the first time into Europe, did not produce moths at the same time, nor as regularly as the acclimatized species.
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