My hermitage boasts a long, wide lilac-walk. When May is here and the two rows of bushes, bending beneath their load of clustering blooms, form pointed arches overhead, this walk becomes a chapel, in which the loveliest festival of the year is celebrated beneath the kisses of the morning sun: a peaceful festival, with no flags flapping at the windows, no expenditure of gun-powder, no drunken squabbles; a festival of simple creatures disturbed neither by the harsh brass band of the dance nor by the shouts of the crowd acclaiming the amateur who has just won a silk handkerchief at the hop, skip and jump. Vulgar delights of drinks and crackers, how far removed are you from this solemn celebration! I am one of the worshippers in the chapel of the lilacs. My orison, which cannot be translated into words, is a tender and intimate emotion. Devoutly I make my stations from one column of verdure to another, telling step by step my observer’s rosary. My prayer is an “Oh!” of admiration. To this delicious festival pilgrims have hastened, to gain the Lenten indulgences and to slake their thirst. Here, dipping their tongues by turns into the holy-water stoup of the same flower, are the Anthophora [1] and her tyrant the Melecta. [2] Robber and victim sip their nectar like good neighbours. There is no ill-feeling: between them. Both attend to their own affairs in peace. They seem not to know each other. The Osmiæ, [3] clad in black-and-red velvet, dust their ventral brushes with pollen and make hoards of meal in the reeds round about. Here are the Eristales, [4] noisy, giddy-pated insects, whose wings shimmer in the sun like scales of mica. Drunk with syrup, they withdraw from the festival and sleep off their debauch in the shadow of a leaf. These others are Wasps, Polistes, [5] hot-tempered swashbucklers. When these intolerant creatures are abroad, peaceful insects withdraw and establish themselves elsewhere. Even the Hive-Bee, predominating in numbers and ever ready to unsheathe her sting, makes way for them, busy as she is gathering in the harvest. These thick-set, richly variegated Moths are Sesiæ, with wings not dusted with scales throughout. The bare zones, like so much transparent gauze, contrast with the covered zones and are an added beauty. The sober sets off the magnificent. Here is a crazy swarm, eddying, receding, returning, rising and falling. It is the ballet of the common Butterfly-folk, the Cabbage Butterflies, [6] all white, with black, eye-shaped dots. They flirt in mid-air, pursuing and pressing their attentions on one another, until, weary of frolic, now one, now another of the dancers alights once more upon the lilacs, quenching her thirst from the amphoræ of the flowers. While the proboscis dives down the narrow throat of the blossom, sucking the nectar at the base, the wings, gently fluttering, are raised above the back, expanding anew and again standing erect.