He often vanishes against the green of the grove as if the working of a sudden charm had conferred invisibility on the flier. This trait of flying into a background and pulling the background in after it is common to many butterflies, who thus prolong life when insect-eating creatures are about. I had thought that _Papilio cresphontes_ had none of this power till one vanished before my very nose, seeming to become one with a big yellow grapefruit, the grapefruit being the one. If I had been a cresphontes-hunting dragonfly I should have given it up. By and by I saw what had happened. Cresphontes had lighted on the yellow ball and folded his wings. All his under side, wings, body and legs, was clothed in a pale yellow fuzz that was like an invisible cloak when laid against the smooth cheek of the fruit. Here was the butterfly’s refuge. No wonder this butterfly haunts the grove. He is one of the largest of the Papilio tribe, a wonderful black and yellow creature, the veritable presiding fairy of the grapefruit groves. The fruit will soon be picked and the golden suns will disappear from the deep green heaven. The white stardust of the milky way of blooms will follow and the groves would be lonesome and colorless if it were not for these great black and yellow butterflies which will flit about them in increasing numbers all summer long. I like to think of them as in their care, waiting my return in the time of full fruit. CHAPTER XIX BUTTERFLIES OF THE INDIAN RIVER Where the Bahamas vex the Gulf Stream so that the rich romance of its violet blue is shoaled into an indignant green that is yet more lovely, there is a grape-like bloom on both sea and sky. Standing on the islands that bar the Indian River from the full tides, you may see this bloom sweep in a purpling vapor from the sea up into a sapphire sky, which it informs with an almost ruby iridescence at times. The gentle southeast winds of mid-March have blown this bloom in from the sea and sky and spread all the landscape of the southern East Coast with it, a pale blue, smoke-like haze in whose aroma there is yet no pungency of smoke. It is like the blue haze of Indian summer which often hangs the New England hills with a violet indistinctness out of which all dreams might well come true.