ldren of night, the soft, luxurious
Sphinxes (or hawk-moths) come not here; fine ladies of the insect
world, their home is among gardens and green-houses, late and languid
by day, but all night long upon the wing, dancing in the air with
unwearied muscles till long past midnight, and supping on honey at
last. They come not here; but the nobler butterflies soar above us,
stoop a moment to the water, and then with a few lazy wavings of their
sumptuous wings float far over the oak-trees to the woods they love.

All these hover near the water-lily; but its special parasites are an
elegant beetle (_Donacia metallica_) which keeps house permanently in
the flower, and a few smaller ones which tenant the surface of the
leaves,--larva, pupa, and perfect insect, forty feeding like one, and
each leading its whole earthly career on this floating island of
perishable verdure. The "beautiful blue damsel-flies" alight also in
multitudes among them, so fearless that they perch with equal
readiness on our boat or paddle, and so various that two adjacent
ponds will sometimes be haunted by two distinct sets of species. In
the water, among the leaves, little shining whirlwigs wheel round and
round, fifty joining in the dance, till, at the slightest alarm, they
whirl away to some safer ballroom, and renew the merriment. On every
floating log, as we approach it, there is a convention of turtles,
sitting in calm debate, like mailed barons, till, as we approach, they
plump into the water, and paddle away for some subaqueous Runnymede.
Beneath, the shy and stately pickerel vanishes at a glance, shoals of
minnows glide, black and bearded pouts frisk aimlessly, soft
water-lizards hang poised without motion, and slender pickerel-frogs
cease occasionally their submerged croaking, and, darting to the
surface with swift vertical strokes, gulp a mouthful of fresh air, and
down again to renew the moist soliloquy.

Time would fail us to tell of the feathered life around us,--the
blackbirds that build securely in these thickets, the stray swallows
that dip their wings in the quiet waters, and the kingfishers that
still bring, as the ancients fabled, halcyon days. Yonder stands,
against the shore, a bittern, motionless in that wreath of mist which
makes his long-legged person almost as dim as his far-off booming by
night. There poises a hawk, before sweeping down to some chosen bough
in the dense forest; and there fly a pair of blue-jays, screaming,
fro