Straight from that concert I made my honourable return to Truro, and found that my spurs were won, and with a light heart played Pirates again, and under the short reign of Byron’s supremacy (for we had been learning “Childe Harold” by heart in the English repetition lesson) deluged the chaste pages of the _Saturday Magazine_ with amorous innocence. Soon, too, the butterfly collection began to assume the virile toga, for though music was forbidden as a study, natural history, as encouraged at Marlborough by the society known as the “Bug and Beetle,” was a legitimate pursuit, and my father strongly approved of my entering for the “Staunton Prize,” awarded to the best collection of butterflies and moths, to be made that spring and summer, and to be adjudged in the autumn. In the warm early-maturing spring of Cornwall, the downs and lanes were lively with lepidoptera at Easter, and those second holidays, passing in a whirl of butterfly nets and a corking and uncorking of killing-bottles, were a sort of canonization of the collections. Brimstones and garden whites, and holly blues and small tortoiseshells took on a more serious aspect, and the pins that eventually fixed them in cork-lined boxes were indeed as nails driven in by masters of assemblies. The collection must be a strictly personal one: I had to catch the victims myself, and kill and set them, but Maggie, even more wildly enthusiastic than me, might, without a violation of conscientious scruples, indicate a yellow-tip enjoying the sunshine, or among nibbled leaves discover a geometer caterpillar turning itself into a measuring-rod.