Then, too, there are others who blush, but with pleasure, at the thought that, without being poets, they have written something out of their own heads which, to them at all events, reads just like poetry. Some of these little poems find their way into an editor's hands, to be looked at and thrown aside in most cases, but occasionally one wins a place in some periodical, and my story relates to one of these chosen products--or rather to three. One summer afternoon, many years ago--but I know the exact date: July 1st, 1897--I was drinking tea on the lawn of a house at Kew, when the maid brought the letters out to her mistress, and she, Mrs. E. Hubbard, looking over the pile remarked that she saw the _Selborne Magazine_ had come and she would just glance over it to see if it contained anything to interest both of us. After a minute or two she exclaimed "Why, here is a poem by Charlie Longman! How strange--I never suspected him of being a poet!" She was speaking of C. J. Longman, the publisher, and it must be explained that he was an intimate friend and connection of hers through his marriage with her niece, the daughter of Sir John Evans the antiquary, and sister of Sir Arthur Evans. The poem was _To the Orange-tip Butterfly_. Cardamines! Cardamines! Thine hour is when the thrushes sing, When gently stirs the vernal breeze, When earth and sky proclaim the spring; When all the fields melodious ring With cuckoos' calls, when all the trees Put on their green, then art thou king Of butterflies, Cardamines. What though thine hour be brief, for thee The storms of winter never blow, No autumn gales shall scorn the lea, Thou scarce shalt feel the summer's glow; But soaring high or flitting low, Or racing with the awakening bees For spring's first draughts of honey--so Thy life is passed, Cardamines. Cardamines! Cardamines! E'en among mortal men I wot Brief life while spring-time quickly flees Might seem a not ungrateful lot: For summer's rays are scorching hot And autumn holds but summer's lees, And swift in autumn is forgot The winter comes, Cardamines. So well pleased were we with this little lyric that we read it aloud two or three times over to each other: for it was a hot summer's day when the early, freshness and bloom is over and the foliage takes on a deeper, almost sombre green; and it brought back to us the vivid spring feeling, the delight we had so often experienced on seeing again the orange-tip, that frail delicate flutterer, the loveliest, the most spiritual, of our butterflies. Oddly enough, the very thing which, one supposes, would spoil a lyric about any natural object--the use of a scientific instead of a popular name, with the doubling and frequent repetition of it--appeared in this instance to add a novel distinction and beauty to the verses.