[Illustration: “_The Bobolink at Home_” (“_Strolls by Starlight_”) _Copyright, 1890, by Harper & Brothers_] an odd little elf of maple, with his winged cap still clinging as he danced upon his slender stem; while numerous nameless green things clove the sod and matted leaves, and slender coils of ferns unrolled in eager grasp from their woolly winter nest. “But dear to my heart as were these familiar tokens, how quickly were they all forgotten in my contemplation simply of a little stone that lay upon a patch of mold directly at my elbow, and my wandering eyes were riveted upon it, for it seemed as though in the universal quickening even this also had taken life. “I can see it this moment. It moves again, and yet again, until now, with a final effort, it is lifted from its setting and rolled away, while in its place there protrudes from the ground a chrysalis risen from its sepulcher. Filled with wonder, I sit and watch as though in a dream, awaiting the revelation from this mysterious earthly messenger, when suddenly the encasement swells and breaks, the cerements are burst, and the strange shape gives birth to the form of a beautiful moth--a tender, trembling thing, which emerges from the empty shell and creeps quivering upon an overhanging spray. “Now followed that beautiful and wonderous unfolding of the winged life--the softly-falling crumpled folds, the quivering pulsations of the new-born wings eager for their flight, until at length their glory shone in purity and perfection--a trial flutter, and the perfect being took wing and flew away! “Thus did I become a votary to that science known as ‘entomology.’ What wonder, then, that it should yield to me in after life a winged significance, a spirit of unrest that bursts the shell of mere terminology, and enjoys a realm of resource not found in books, except, indeed, between the lines? For the entomology which I would seek is not yet written, and it is beyond my conception that any one among its votaries could witness unmoved by its deeper impress a spectacle such as this, or could find through the retina of science alone an ample insight.” It is a curious feature of his experience that even the birds and the beasts seemed to feel this sympathy of his, and permitted him to take such liberties with them as they seldom grant. So many stories of his power and its exercise have gone out, that it seems best to let him give his own version of it. The first instances are narrated in a letter written from the Thorn Mountain House, Jackson, New Hampshire, in September, 1883: