importunate widow. But they are most terrifying of all if one suddenly
sees their eyes blazing crimson as they catch the light. One thinks of
nocturnal rites in an African forest temple and of terrible jewels
blazing in the head of an evil goddess--jewels to be stolen, we
realise, by a foolish white man, thereafter to be the object of a
vendetta in a sensational novel. One feels that one's hair would be
justified in standing on end, only that hair does not do such things.
The sight of a moth's eye is, I fancy, a rare one for most people. It
is a sight one can no more forget than a house on fire. Our feelings
towards moths being what they are, it is all the more surprising that
superstition should connect the moth so much less than the butterfly
with the world of the dead. Who save a cabbage-grower has any feeling
against butterflies? And yet in folk-lore it is to the butterfly
rather than to the moth that is assigned the ghostly part. In Ireland
they have a legend about a priest who had not believed that men had
souls, but, on being converted, announced that a living thing would be
seen soaring up from his body when he died--in proof that his earlier
scepticism had been wrong. Sure enough, when he lay dead, a beautiful
creature "with four snow-white wings" rose from his body and fluttered
round his head. "And this," we are told, "was the first butterfly that
was ever seen in Ireland; and now all men know that the butterflies
are the souls of the dead waiting for the moment when they may enter
Purgatory." In the Solomon Islands, they say, it used to be the
custom, when a man was about to die, for him to announce that he was
about to transmigrate into a butterfly or some other creature. The
members of his family, on meeting a butterfly afterwards, would
exclaim: "This is papa," and offer him a coco-nut. The members of an
English family in like circumstances would probably say: "Have a
banana." In certain tribes of Assam the dead are believed to return in
the shape of butterflies or house-flies, and for this reason no one