Probably it was as a sleeping-place and bedroom that the
butterflies made it their home. There is a parallel instance, mentioned by
a Dutch naturalist quoted by Mr. Kirby, when a butterfly came night after
night to sleep on a particular spot in the roof of a verandah in the
Eastern Archipelago. In the East the sun itself is so regular and so rapid
in rising and setting that the sleeping hours of insects and birds are far
more regular than in temperate lands, with their shifting periods of light
and darkness. Our twilight, that season that the tropics know not, has
produced a curious race of moths, or rather, a curious habit confined to
certain kinds. They are the creatures neither of day nor of night, but of
twilight. They awake as twilight begins, go about their business and enjoy
a brief and crepuscular activity, and go to sleep as soon as darkness
settles on the world. At the first glimmer of the dawn they awaken again
to fly till sunrise, when they hurry off like the fairies, and sleep till
twilight falls again.
[Illustration: BUTTERFLIES AT REST. _From photographs by R.B. Lodge._]
At the time of writing a border of bright flowers runs in straight
perspective from the window opposite, with a rose arcade by the border,
and a yew hedge behind that.
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