[Illustration:... "Little butterfly, indeed
I know not if you sleep or feed."]
When we, by rough handling, brush the bloom off a butterfly's wing, we have
really torn away these delicate scales.
Let us suppose we have been so fortunate as to find a Red-admiral, the
most gorgeous of British butterflies--often found late in the summer near
nettles, because its caterpillar used to like their leaves better than any
other.
We will look at this beautiful insect and see what it _is_, and then go
back in its history and find out what it _was_.
It has six feet, and its head bears two horns or feelers ("antennae," they
are called), two large eyes which, when seen under a microscope, seem as if
cut like precious stones, and a trunk like that of an elephant, which it
can uncurl so as to suck the honey from the very heart of the flowers. Its
legs are hairy, and very little used; its body, light and slender. Of the
broad, beautifully-marked wings, generally erect when at rest, we need not
speak, for it would be impossible to describe them.
Now for a page or two in the early history of this brilliant creature.
We will go back to the time when it was a tiny egg, laid by the mother
Red-admiral shortly before her own death; this egg soon develops into the
"larva," or caterpillar--the word, which means a _mask_, expressing that
the butterfly that is to be, is thus disguised in its first form.
How admirable are God's orderings--the same spring sunbeams which, as it
were, waken up the living creature sleeping in the egg deposited by Mrs.
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