Butterflies are always coming in on the twigs. With their wings folded flat together, showing only their dry undersides, they look so like old withered leaves that it is only when the warmth of the room wakes them, and they flutter off to the windows, that they can be recognized as butterflies at all. One flew to the south window yesterday and crawled there, beating his delicate wings against the glass all morning. He was brown, tan and yellow on the upper side but underneath so like a dry, woolly old leaf as to be an amazing bit of nature’s mimicry. As I looked at his poor, torn wings and feebly waving antennæ he seemed suddenly the very oldest thing, the lone survivor of a forgotten summer, a piteous little Tithonus, to whom had been granted the terrible gift of immortality, without the boon of an immortal youth.
At first I thought that he was being given a respite from the common fate of butterflies, for I did not then know that the angle wings can last over the winter, lying dormant in protected places, and that the last brood of a summer can live until another spring. I even planned to outwit nature by feeding this one and keeping him alive in the artificial summer of the warm house. I made a sirup of sugar and water and offered it but the butterfly would none of it, only crawling and beating his wings in a vain effort to escape through the glass into the bleak November sunshine. At length I carried him to the door, and he fluttered off to a bush and clung there. After turning away for a moment I went back to find him; he was gone; he had become a dead leaf again.
[Picture: “Peter the rabbit, is turning white very rapidly”]
Peter, the rabbit, spends most of his time at the door, waiting for a chance crust. He fsits on his haunches, rocking gently back and forth, making a soft, little knocking noise on the porch floor. If I am late in coming out at mealtimes, he looks at me with so dignified an air of patient reproof that I feel quite apologetic for having kept him waiting. His meal finished, he washes his face and paws carefully, like a cat, then sits in the sun, eyes closed, forepaws tucked away under his breast and ears laid back along his shoulders. He is turning white very rapidly. At first, only his tail, feet, breast and the ends of his ears were lightly powdered, but now he looks as if he had hopped into a pan of flour by mistake.