One evening, in a potato-patch, I witnessed a large hawk-moth meet his end in a way that greatly surprised me. I was watching and listening to the shrilling of a great green grasshopper, or leaf cricket, that delightful insect about which I shall have to write at some length in another chapter, when the big moth suddenly appeared at a distance of a dozen yards from where I stood. It was about the size of a privet-moth, and had not been many moments suspended before a spray of flowers, when a meadow-pipit, which had come there probably to roost, dashed at and struck it down, and then on the ground began a curious struggle. The great moth, looking more than half as big as the aggressor, beat the pipit with his strong wings in his efforts to free himself; but the other had clutched the soft, stout body in its claws, and standing over it with wings half open and head feathers raised, struck repeatedly at it with the greatest fury until it was killed. Then, in the same savage hawk-like manner, the dead thing was torn {117} up, the pipit swallowing pieces so much too large for it that it had the greatest trouble to get them down. The gentle, timid, little bird had for the moment put on the "rage of the vulture." In the southern half of the New Forest, that part of the country where insects of all kinds most abound, the moths and butterflies are relatively less important as a feature of the place, and as things of beauty, than some other kinds. The purple emperor is very rarely seen, but the silver-washed fritillary, a handsome, conspicuous insect, is quite common, and when several of these butterflies are seen at one spot playing about the bracken in some open sunlit space in the oak woods, opening their orange-red spotty wings on the broad, vivid green fronds, they produce a strikingly beautiful effect. It is like a mosaic of minute green tesseræ adorned with red and black butterfly shapes, irregularly placed. But here the most charming butterfly to my mind is the white admiral, when they are seen in numbers, as in the abundant season of 1901, when the oak woods were full of them. Here is a species which, seen in a collection, is of no more value æsthetically than a dead leaf or a frayed feather dropped in the poultry-yard, or an old postage stamp in an album, without a touch of brilliance on its dull blackish-brown and white wings; yet which alive pleases the eye more than the splendid and larger kinds solely because of its peculiarly graceful flight. It never flutters, and as it sweeps airily hither and thither, now high as the tree-tops, now close to the earth in {118} the sunny glades and open brambly places in the oak woods, with an occasional stroke of the swift-gliding wings, it gives you the idea of a smaller, swifter, more graceful swallow, and sometimes of a curiously-marked, pretty dragon-fly. [Sidenote: Dragon-flies]