And, indeed, it was true that butterflies were something more to Laleham than entomology. They were rather a poetic than a scientific passion. There was a strong vein of the mystic and poetic in his nature to which in some way, mysterious even to himself, these strange little painted things had from childhood appealed. As the smallest boy, he had proved himself a passionist of the solitudes of nature, by lone woodland truancies and long tramps through that gipsy wilderness, which England, with all its lawns and market-gardens and nurseries, has so remarkably preserved. And, from the first moment that he found himself alone, hushed and watching and listening, and a little afraid, in the belt of mighty beeches that was perhaps the chief honour of his pedigree, there had seemed a spell, an enchantment, over these lonely leaves, these gnome-like shapes of mottled bole, and these twisted roots that seemed to have become so through some mysterious agonies of ancient torture--though indeed, to most folk there was nothing there but leaves and the famous Laleham covers.
He had never forgotten the day when that spell of exquisite silence and dappled sunshine--the whole woodland with its finger on its lip--had suddenly become embodied in a tiny shape of coloured velvet wings that came floating zig-zag up the dingle, swift as light, aery as a perfume, soft and silent as the figured carpet in some Eastern palace. With what awe he watched it, as at length it settled near him on a sunlit weed, with what a luxury of observation his eyes noted its sumptuous unearthly markings, and what an image of wonder and exquisite mystery it there and forever left upon his mind. In a moment it was up and away upon its uncharted travel through the wood. Instinctively, he ran in pursuit. But it was too late. He had lost his first butterfly.
For Laleham, from that moment, all the beauty of the world, and the mystery and the elusiveness of it, were symbolised in a butterfly. From that moment it seemed to him that the success of life was--the catching of a certain butterfly.
He was now thirty years old and had caught many butterflies, caught them in every part of the world, and the adventures he had met with in the apparently insignificant chase, were they to be written, would fully justify the defence he sometimes made of what the world called his whimsical hobby. “You must not look upon my butterflies as trivial,” he would say. “The study of much smaller things has made modern science; and a butterfly may well lead you to the ends of the earth--and even lose you among the stars. You never know where it may take you. There is no hunting more full of exciting possibilities. If you dare follow a butterfly, you dare go anywhere; and no quarry will lead you into stranger places, or into such beautiful unexpected adventures.”