The Banded Monk is not, in my region, a common Moth whom we are likely to catch if the fancy takes us to go out with a net at the proper season. I have never seen it about the village, especially not in my lonely enclosure, during all the twenty years that I have spent here. I am not a fervent hunter, I admit; the collector’s dead insect interests me very little; I want it alive, in the full exercise of its faculties. But I make up for the absence of the collector’s zeal by an attentive eye for all that enlivens the fields. A Moth so remarkable in size and costume would certainly not have escaped me had I met him. The little seeker whom I had caught so nicely with a promise of the roundabout never made a second find. For three years I requisitioned friends and neighbours, especially the youngsters, those sharp-eyed scrapers of the brushwood; I myself scraped a great deal under masses of dead leaves, inspected stone-heaps, examined hollow tree-trunks. My trouble was in vain: the precious cocoon was nowhere to be found. Suffice it to say that the Banded Monk is very scarce in my neighbourhood. The importance of this detail will be seen when the time comes. As I suspected, my solitary cocoon did belong to the famous Moth. On the 20th of August there emerges a female, corpulent and big-bellied, attired like the male, but in a lighter frock, more in the nankeen style. I establish her in a wire-gauze bell-jar in the middle of my study, on the big laboratory-table, littered with books, pots, trays, boxes, test-tubes and other engines of science. I have described the setting before: it is the same as in the case of the Great Peacock. The room is lighted by two windows looking out on the garden. One is closed, the other is kept open day and night. The Moth is placed between the two, in the shadow, some four or five yards away. The rest of the day and the following day pass without anything worth mentioning. Hanging by her claws to the front of the trellis-work, on the side nearest the light, the prisoner is motionless, inert. There is no waving of the wings, no quivering of the antennæ. Even so did the female Great Peacock behave. The mother Bombyx matures; her tender flesh hardens. By some process of which our science has not the remotest idea, she elaborates an irresistible bait which will bring callers flocking to her from the four corners of the heavens. What takes place in that fat body, what transformations are performed that shall presently revolutionize everything around? Were they known to us, the Moth’s nostrums would add a cubit to our stature. On the third day the bride is ready. The festivities burst into full swing. I was in the garden, already despairing of success, so long were things delayed, when, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, in very hot weather and brilliant sunshine, I saw a host of Moths gyrating in the embrasure of the open window.