and it is perhaps the only one found in greatest
perfection in the West: but it is beautiful every where. In a
bright day, during any of the summer months, your walk is through
an atmosphere of butterflies, so gaudy in hue, and so varied in
form, that I often thought they looked like flowers on the wing.
Some of them are very large, measuring three or four inches
across the wings; but many, and I think the most beautiful, are
smaller than ours. Some have wings of the most dainty lavender
colour; and bodies of black; others are fawn and rose colour; and
others again are orange and bright blue. But pretty as they are,
it is their number, even more than their beauty, that delights
the eye. Their gay and noiseless movement as they glance through
the air, crossing each other in chequered maze, is very
beautiful. The humming-bird is another pretty summer toy; but
they are not sufficiently numerous, nor do they live enough on
the wing to render them so important a feature in the
transatlantic show, as the rainbow-tinted butterflies. The
fire-fly was a far more brilliant novelty. In moist situations,
or before a storm, they are very numerous, and in the dark sultry
evening of a burning day, when all employment was impossible, I
have often found it a pastime to watch their glancing light, now
here, now there; now seen, now gone; shooting past with the
rapidity of lightning, and looking like a shower of falling
stars, blown about in the breeze of evening.

In one of our excursions we encountered and slew a copperhead
snake. I escaped treading on it by about three inches. While we
were contemplating our conquered foe, and doubting in our
ignorance if he were indeed the deadly copper-head we had so
often heard described, a farmer joined us, who, as soon as he
cast his eyes on our victim, exclaimed, "My! if you have not got
a copper. That's right down well done, they be darnation
beasts." He told us that he had once seen a copper-head bite
himself to death, from being teazed by a stick, while confined in
a cage where he could find no other victim. We often heard
terrible accounts of the number of these desperate reptiles to be
found on the rocks near the great falls of the Potomac; but not
even the terror these stories inspired could prevent our repeated
visits to that sublime scene; Luckily our temerity was never
punished by seeing any there. Lizards, long, large, and most
hideously like a miniature crocodile,