Almost as numerous but less sudden in flight, because of his wide-spreading wings, is the Machaon, the magnificent Swallow-tail Butterfly, with the orange spots and the blue crescents. The children have come to join me. They are enraptured by this elegant creature, which always escapes their pouncing hands and flies a little farther to taste the nectar of the flowers while moving its wings after the fashion of the Cabbage Butterfly. If the pump is working quietly in the sunlight, if the syrup is rising easily, this gentle fanning of the wings is in all these Butterflies a sign of satisfaction. A catch! Anna, the youngest of the whole household, gives up all hope of capturing the Swallow-tails, who never wait for her nimble little hand to seize them. She has found something more to her liking. It is the Cetonia. The handsome insect has not yet recovered from the chill of morning; it lies slumbering all golden on the lilac-blossoms, unconscious of danger, incapable of flight. It is plentiful. Five or six are quickly caught. I intervene, so that the rest may be left in peace. The booty is placed in a box, with a bed of blossoms. Presently, during the heat of the day, the Cetonia, with a long thread tied to one leg, will fly in circles round the little girl’s head. Childhood is pitiless because it does not understand, for nothing is more cruel than ignorance. None of my madcaps will heed the sufferings of the insect, a melancholy galley-slave chained to a cannon-ball. These artless minds find amusement in torture. I dare not always call them to order, for I admit that I on my side am also guilty, though I am ripened by experience, to some extent civilized and beginning to know a thing or two. They inflict suffering for the sake of amusement and I for the sake of information: is it not really the same thing? Is there a very definite line of demarcation between the experiments of knowledge and the puerilities of childhood? I cannot see it. Human barbarity in the past employed the rack to force a prisoner to speak. Am I anything but a torturer when I interrogate my insects and put them to the rack to wrest some secret from them? Let Anna get such pleasure as she can out of her prisoners, for I am meditating something worse. The Cetonia has things to reveal to us, things that will interest us, beyond a doubt. Let us try to obtain these revelations. We cannot, of course, do so without serious inconvenience to the insect. So be it; and now let us proceed: we will silence our kindly scruples for the sake of the story.