nes, which, thrilled with the mystery of their author and
cause, yet merged smoothly with the cosmic orchestra of wind and
ripples and distant rain.

So the great, smooth, arching lift of granite rocks at our bungalow's
shore, where the giant catfish sang, was ever afterward Boom-boom
Point. And now I sat close by on the sand and strove to think anew of
my butterflies, for they were the reason of my being there that
brilliant October afternoon. But still my pen refused, hovering about
the thing of ultimate interest as one leaves the most desired book to
the last. For again the ear claimed dominance, and I listened to a new
little refrain over my shoulder. I pictured a tiny sawhorse, and a
midget who labored with might and main to cut through a never-ending
stint of twigs. I chose to keep my image to the last, and did not
move or look around, until there came the slightest of tugs at my
knee, and into view clambered one of those beings who are so beautiful
and bizarre that one almost thinks they should not be. My second
singer was a beetle--an awkward, enormous, serious, brilliant beetle,
with six-inch antennae and great wing covers, which combined the hues
of the royal robes of Queen Thi, tempered by thousands of years of
silent darkness in the underground tombs at Sakhara, with the grace of
curve and angle of equally ancient characters on the hill tombs of
Fokien. On a background of olive ochre there blazed great splashes and
characters of the red of jasper framed in black. Toward the front
Nature had tried heavy black stippling, but it clouded the pattern and
she had given it up in order that I might think of Egypt and Cathay.

But the thing which took the beetle quite out of a world of reasonable
things was his forelegs. They were outrageous, and he seemed to think
so, too, for they got in his way, and caught in wrong things and
pulled him to one side. They were three times the length of his other
limbs, spreading sideways a full thirteen inches, long, slender,
beautifully sculptured, and forever reaching out in front for
whatever long-armed beetles most desire. And his song, as he climbed
over me, was squeaky and sawlike, and as he walked he doddered, head
trembling as an old man's shakes in final acquiescence in the futility
of life.

But in this great-armed beetle it was a nodding of necessity, a
doddering of desire, the drawing of the bow across the strings in a
hymn of hope which had begun in past time with t