same dry grasses of the hills, another of the most brilliant insects of
this country may often be seen sleeping in swarms--the carmine and green
burnet moth. But it is a sluggish creature, which often seems scarcely
awake in the day, and its surrender to the dominion of sleep excites less
surprise than the deep slumber of the active and vivacious butterflies.
The "heaths" and "blues" should perhaps be regarded as the gipsies of the
butterfly world, because they sleep in the open. They are even worse off
than the nomads, because, like that regiment sleeping in the open which
the War Office lately refused to grant field allowance to on the ground
that they were "not under canvas," they do not possess even a temporary
roof. What we may call the "garden butterflies," especially the red
admirals, often do seek a roof, going into barns, sheds, churches,
verandahs, and even houses to sleep. There, too, they sometimes wake up in
winter from their long hibernating sleep, and remind us of summer days
gone by as they flicker on the sun-warmed panes. Mrs. Brightwen
established the fact that they sometimes have fixed homes to which they
return. Two butterflies, one a brimstone, the other, so far as the writer
remembers, a red admiral, regularly came for admission to the house. One
was killed by a rain-storm when the window was shut; the other hibernated
in the house. Probably it was as a sleeping-place and bedroom that the
butterflies made it their home. There is a parallel instance, mentioned by
a Dutch naturalist quoted by Mr. Kirby, when a butterfly came night after
night to sleep on a particular spot in the roof of a verandah in the
Eastern Archipelago. In the East the sun itself is so regular and so rapid
in rising and setting that the sleeping hours of insects and birds are far
more regular than in temperate lands, with their shifting periods of light
and darkness. Our twilight, that season that the tropics know not, has
produced a curious race of moths, or rather, a curious habit confined to
certain kinds. They are the creatures neither of day nor of night, but of
twilight. They awake as twilight begins, go about their business and enjoy