out in the full sun, and the front of his soft white summer shirt
made a patch of sharp light against the surrounding tones of brown and
green. When it had for a time remained quite still, the patch of
whiteness attracted attention, and various insects alighted upon it to
investigate. Presently the man noticed a very large steel-blue
dragon-fly on rustling wings balancing in the air a few feet in front
of him. At this moment, from a branch overhead, a hungry shrike dashed
down. The dragon-fly saw the peril just in time; and, instead of
fleeing desperately across the pool, to be almost inevitably overtaken
by the strong-winged bird, it dashed forward and perched for refuge on
a fold of the dazzling white shirt. The foiled shrike, with an angry
and astonished twitter, flew off to a tree across the pool.

For perhaps a minute the great fly stood with moveless, wide-spread
wings, scintillating aerial hues as if its body was compacted of a
million microscopic prisms. The transparent tissue of its wings was
filled with a finer and more elusive iridescence. The great rounded,
globose, overlapping jaws, half as big as the creature's whole head,
kept opening and shutting, as if to polish their edges. The other half
of its head was quite occupied by two bulging, brilliant spheres of
eyes, which seemed to hold in their transparent yet curiously
impenetrable depths a shifting light of emerald and violet. These
inscrutable and enormous eyes--each one nearly as great in
circumference as the creature's body--rolled themselves in a steady
stare at the man's face, till he felt the skin of his cheeks creep at
their sinister beauty. It seemed to him as if a spirit hostile and
evil had threatened him from beneath those shining eyes; and he was
amused to experience, for all his interest, a sense of half-relief
when the four beautiful wings hurtled crisply and the creature darted
away.

It would seem, however, that the fold of white shirt had found favour
in those mysteriously gleaming eyes; for a minute or two later the
same fly returned to the same spot. The man recognized not only its
unusual size and its splendour of colour, but a broken notch on one of
its wing films, the mark of the tip of a bird's beak. This time the
dragon-fly came not as a fugitive from fate, but as a triumphant
dispenser of fate to others. It carried between its jaws the body of
a small green grasshopper, which it had already partly eaten.

Fixing the enigmatic