t was a sort
of sixth sense with him. That cold, clear, incisive power of brain
which on a time had made Slippy McGee the greatest cracksman in
America, was, trained and disciplined in a better cause, to make John
Flint in later years an international authority upon lepidoptera, an
observer to whom other observers deferred, a naturalist whose dictum
settled disputed points. And I knew it, I foresaw it!

_Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!_ I grew as vain over his enlarging
powers as if I had been the Mover of the Game, not a pawn. I felt,
gloriously, that I had not lived for nothing. A great naturalist is
not born every day, no, nor every year, nor even every century. And I
had caught me a great burglar and I had hatched me a great naturalist!
My Latin soul was enraptured with this ironic anomaly. I could not
choose but love the man for that.

I really had some cause for vanity. Others than myself had been
gradually drawn to the unassuming Butterfly Man. Westmoreland loved
him. A sympathetic listener who seldom contradicted, but often
shrewdly suggested, Flint somehow knew how to bring out the big
doctor's best; and in consequence found himself in contact with a mind
above all meanness and a nature as big and clean as a spray-swept
beach.

"Oh, my, my, my, what a surgeon gone to waste!" Westmoreland would
lament, watching the long, sure fingers at work. "Well, I suppose it's
all for the best that Father De Rance beat me to you--at least you've
done less damage learning your trade." So absorbed would he become
that he sometimes forget cross patients who were possibly fuming
themselves into a fever over his delay.

Eustis, who had met the Butterfly Man on the country roads and had
stopped his horse for an informal chat, would thereafter go out of his
way for a talk with him. These two reticent men liked each other
immensely. At opposite poles, absolutely dissimilar, they yet had odd
similarities and meeting-points. Eustis was nothing if not practical;
he was never too busy to forget to be kind. Books and pamphlets that
neither Flint nor I could have hoped to possess found their way to us
through him. Scientific periodicals and the better magazines came
regularly to John Flint's address. That was Eustis's way. This
friendship put the finishing touch upon the Butterfly Man's repute. He
was my associate, and my mother was devoted to him. Miss Sally Ruth,
whose pet pear-tree he had saved and whose pigeons he had cured,
approv