"Good-evening--or, good-morning, perchance," said Fontenette. "I suepose thaz a great thing to remove those old stain' that chloro_form_, eh?" "Ach! it iss you? Ach, you must coom--coom undt hellup me! Coom! you shall see _someding_." "A moment," said the Creole. "May I inquire you how is that, that you call on us in yo' sock feet?" "Ach! I am already t'e socks putting on pefore I remember I do not need t'em! But coom! coom! see a vonderfool!" He led, and Fontenette, when he had blown a cloud of smoke through his nose, followed, saying exclusively for his own ear: "A wonder fool, yes! But a fool is no wonder to me any more; I find myself to be that kind." X When, hypocritically clad in dressing-gown and slippers, I stopped at my guest's inner door and Fontenette opened it just enough to let me enter, I saw, indeed, a wonderful sight. The entomologist had lighted up the room, and it was filled, filled! with gorgeous moths as large as my hand and all of a kind, dancing across one another's airy paths in a bewildering maze or alighting and quivering on this thing and that. The mosquito-net, draping almost from ceiling to floor, was beflowered with them majestically displaying in splendid alternation their upper and under colors, or, with wings lifted and vibrant, tipping to one side and another as they crept up the white mesh, like painted and gilded sails in a fairies' regatta. And all this life and beauty, this gay glory and tremorous ecstasy and effort was here for moth-love of one incarnate fever of frail-winged loveliness! Oh! to what unguessed archangelic observation, to what infinite seraphic compassion, may not our own swarming race, who dare not too much pity ourselves, be but just such dainty ephemera! Splendid in purposes, intelligence, and affections as these in colors and grace, glorious when on the wing, and marvellous still, riddles of wonder, even when crawling and quivering, tipping and swerving from the upright and true, like these palpitating flowers of desire, now this way and now that, forever drawn and driven by the sweet tyrannies of instinct and impulse. So rushed the thought in upon me, and if it was not of the divinest or manliest inspiration, at least it took some uncharity out of me for the moment. As in mechanical silence Fontenette obeyed the busy requests of the entomologist, I presently looked more on those two than on the winged multitude, and thought on, of the myriad true tales of love-weakness and love-wrath for which they and their two pretty mates were just now so unlucky as to stand; of the awful naturalness of such things; of the butterfly beauty and wonder--nay, rather the divine possibilities of the lives such things so naturally speed to wreck; and then of Tom Moore almost too playfully singing: Ah! did we take for Heaven above But half such pains as we Take, day and night, for woman's love, What Angels we should be!