murely to Kenelm's side.

"Do you collect insects?" said that philosopher, as much surprised as it
was his nature to be at anything.

"Only butterflies," answered Lily; "they are not insects, you know; they
are souls."

"Emblems of souls you mean,--at least, so the Greeks prettily
represented them to be."

"No, real souls,--the souls of infants that die in their cradles
unbaptized; and if they are taken care of, and not eaten by birds, and
live a year then they pass into fairies."

"It is a very poetical idea, Miss Mordaunt, and founded on evidence
quite as rational as other assertions of the metamorphosis of one
creature into another. Perhaps you can do what the philosophers
cannot,--tell me how you learned a new idea to be an incontestable
fact?"

"I don't know," replied Lily, looking very much puzzled; "perhaps I
learned it in a book, or perhaps I dreamed it."

"You could not make a wiser answer if you were a philosopher. But you
talk of taking care of butterflies; how do you do that? Do you impale
them on pins stuck into a glass case?"

"Impale them! How can you talk so cruelly? You deserve to be pinched by
the fairies."

"I am afraid," thought Kenelm, compassionately, "that my companion has
no mind to be formed; what is euphoniously called 'an innocent.'"

He shook his head and remained silent. Lily resumed,--

"I will show you my collection when we get home; they seem so happy. I
am sure there are some of them who know me: they will feed from my hand.
I have only had one die since I began to collect them last summer."

"Then you have kept them a year: they ought to have turned into
fairies."

"I suppose many of them have. Of course I let out all those that had
been with me twelve months: they don't turn to fairies in the cage,
you know. Now I have only those I caught this year, or last autumn; the
prettiest don't appear till the autumn."

The girl here bent her uncovered head over the straw hat, her tresses
shadowing it, and uttered loving words to the prisoner. Then again she
looked up and around her, and abruptly stopped, and exclaimed,--

"How can people live in towns? How can people say they are ever dull in
the country? Look," she continued, gravely and earnestly, "look at that
tall pine-tree, with its long branch sweeping over the water; see how,
as the breeze catches it, it changes its shadow, and how the shadow
changes the play of the sunlight on the brook:--

"'Wave your tops, ye p