Here, too, we saw a most beautiful sight—a fine convolvulus hawk-moth (we had made acquaintance with another the evening before), up and dissipating at an hour when all well-regulated moths should be wrapped in downy slumbers, and making, as we thought, a most unfair use of a proboscis full two inches long to drain the nectar from a whole spike of yellow salvia, before any of its fellows should be awake to cry halves. It was a pert fly, and seemed quite to revel in the sunlight—a ‘_fast_’ trait, it is to be feared in a nocturnal insect. Such airs, too, as it gave itself!—flouting here, flirting there; flitting on from conquest to conquest. As if the gorgeous creature did not know that it was irresistible! As if the very sunbeams did not lackey it—showering gold-dust over that expanse of delicately-mottled grey! What Danae sprite, never so pent up in perfumed cell, could resist such courtship? What flowery elf be proof against the superb obeisance of that taper body, tricked out in all its tiger livery of rose and sable? To see it dawdle round a bevy of fair blossoms, in lazy eddies, drifting rather than flying, with a _blasé_ air of languid inspection; to see it, in more light fantastic vein, dance off to the flower of its capricious choice, and bob airily up and down, coquetting with those saffron lips, ere it poised—how daintily!—to steal their sweetness. It was decidedly livelier than our friend of yestereen, and so intent upon its nectar as to let us gaze within a foot of it; it seemed to have a keener, a more epicurean, enjoyment of life, and gave itself all the airs of a _bon-vivant_. Indeed it showed its good taste in its preference for salvia; for the scent of these flowers is exquisite, and I have sometimes stopped wonderingly to look for musk, so like is the smell at a little distance off. On this side of the mountains the flowers and foliage are more luxuriant. Glade and woodland are sprinkled with kinds we have not yet met with, a large rosy cranesbill, a yellow labiate, with a peak of the most gorgeous purple leaves—if indeed they were not petals—tremulous little hare-bells, _lastræa_ and delicate varieties of ferns, while here and there bright scarlet strawberries gemmed the ground. The trees grow to an even more gigantic stature than those we saw before. We measured beeches fifteen feet in circumference, at about three feet from the ground; and many—as on the Mazulia Planina opposite, where some of the finest timber in Bosnia is said to grow—rise to a height of a hundred and twenty feet. A pine-tree measured fourteen feet and a half in girth.