live a year then they pass into fairies."

"It is a very poetical idea, Miss Mordaunt, and founded on evidence
quite as rational as other assertions of the metamorphosis of one
creature into another. Perhaps you can do what the philosophers
cannot,--tell me how you learned a new idea to be an incontestable
fact?"

"I don't know," replied Lily, looking very much puzzled; "perhaps I
learned it in a book, or perhaps I dreamed it."

"You could not make a wiser answer if you were a philosopher. But you
talk of taking care of butterflies; how do you do that? Do you impale
them on pins stuck into a glass case?"

"Impale them! How can you talk so cruelly? You deserve to be pinched
by the fairies."

"I am afraid," thought Kenelm, compassionately, "that my companion has
no mind to be formed; what is euphoniously called 'an innocent.'"

He shook his head and remained silent. Lily resumed,--

"I will show you my collection when we get home; they seem so happy.
I am sure there are some of them who know me: they will feed from my
hand. I have only had one die since I began to collect them last
summer."

"Then you have kept them a year: they ought to have turned into
fairies."