earth was swept of its inhabitants, but the seeds of life were not dead.
Near by were the tents of the gipsies--an Eastern race, whose forefathers
perhaps had seen that very Magian worship of the Light; and in those
tents birth had already taken place. Under the Night of winter--under the
power of dark Ahriman, the evil spirit of Destruction--lay bud and germ
in bondage, waiting for the coming of Ormuzd, the Sun of Light and
Summer. Beneath the snow, and in the frozen crevices of the trees, in the
chinks of the earth, sealed up by the signet of frost, were the seeds of
the life that would replenish the air in time to come. The buzzing crowds
of summer were still under the snow.

This forest land is marked by the myriads of insects that roam about it
in the days of sunshine. Of all the million million heathbells--multiply
them again by a million million more--that purple the acres of rolling
hills, mile upon mile, there is not one that is not daily visited by
these flying creatures. Countless and incalculable hosts of the
yellow-barred hover-flies come to them; the heath and common, the moor
and forest, the hedgerow and copse, are full of insects. They rise under
foot, they rise from the spray brushed by your arm as you pass, they
settle down in front of you--a rain of insects, a coloured shower. Legion
is a little word for the butterflies; the dry pastures among the woods
are brown with meadow-brown; blues and coppers float in endless
succession; all the nations of Xerxes' army were but a handful to these.
In their millions they have perished; but somewhere, coiled up, as it
were, and sealed under the snow, there must have been the mothers and
germs of the equally vast crowds that will fill the atmosphere this year.
The great bumble-bee that shall be mother of hundreds, the yellow wasp
that shall be mother of thousands, were hidden there somewhere. The food
of the migrant birds that are coming from over sea was there dormant
under the snow. Many nations have a tradition of a former world destroyed