nishing when ripples caught the light, redoubled by reflection when
the water lay quiet and polished. For month after month they passed,
sometimes absent for days or weeks, but soon to be counted at earliest
sunup, always arousing renewed curiosity, always bringing to mind the
first flurry of winter.

We watch the autumn passing of birds with regret, but when the
bluebirds warble their way southward we are cheered with the hope and
the knowledge that some, at least, will return. Here, vast stretches
of country, perhaps all Guiana, and how much of Brazil and Venezuela
no one knows, poured forth a steady stream of yellow and orange
butterflies. They were very beautiful and they danced and flickered
in the sunlight, but this was no temporary shifting to a pleasanter
clime or a land of more abundant flowers, but a migration in the grim
old sense which Cicero loved, _non dubitat_ ... _migrare de vita_. No
butterfly ever turned back, or circled again to the glade, with its
yellow cassia blooms where he had spent his caterpillarhood. Nor did
he fly toward the north star or the sunset, but between the two.
Twelve years before, as I passed up the Essequibo and the Cuyuni, I
noticed hundreds of yellow butterflies each true to his little compass
variation of NNW.

There are times and places in Guiana where emigrating butterflies turn
to the north or the south; sometimes for days at a time, but sooner or
later the eddies straighten out, their little flotillas cease tacking,
and all swing again NNW.

To-day the last of the migration stragglers of the year--perhaps the
fiftieth great-grandsons of those others--held true to the Catopsilian
lodestone.

My masculine pronouns are intentional, for of all the thousands and
tens of thousands of migrants, all, as far as I know, were males.
Catch a dozen yellows in a jungle glade and the sexes may be equal.
But the irresistible maelstrom impels only the males. Whence they come
or why they go is as utterly unknown to us as why the females are
immune.

Once, from the deck of a steamer, far off the Guiana coast, I saw
hosts of these same great saffron-wings flying well above the water,
headed for the open sea. Behind them were sheltering fronds, nectar,
soft winds, mates; before were corroding salt, rising waves, lowering
clouds, a storm imminent. Their course was NNW, they sailed under
sealed orders, their port was Death.

Looking out over the great expanse of the Mazaruni, the flutteri