on once
slackened, the butterflies took up their more usual lives. But what
could I know of the meaning of "normal" in the life of a butterfly--I
who boasted a miserable single pair of eyes and no greater number of
legs, whose shoulders supported only shoulder blades, and whose youth
was barren of caterpillarian memories!

As I have said, migration was at an end, yet here I had stumbled upon
a Bay of Butterflies. No matter whether one's interest in life lay
chiefly with ornithology, teetotalism, arrowheads, politics, botany,
or finance, in this bay one's thoughts would be sure to be
concentrated on butterflies. And no less interesting than the
butterflies were their immediate surroundings. The day before, I had
sat close by on a low boulder at the head of the tiny bay, with not a
butterfly in sight. It occurred to me that my ancestor, Eryops, would
have been perfectly at home, for in front of me were clumps of
strange, carboniferous rushes, lacking leaves and grace, and sedges
such as might be fashioned in an attempt to make plants out of green
straw. Here and there an ancient jointed stem was in blossom, a
pinnacle of white filaments, and hour after hour there came little
brown trigonid visitors, sting-less bees, whose nests were veritable
museums of flower extracts--tubs of honey, hampers of pollen, barrels
of ambrosia, hoarded in castles of wax. Scirpus-sedge or orchid, all
was the same to them.

All odor evaded me until I had recourse to my usual olfactory crutch,
placing the flower in a vial in the sunlight. Delicate indeed was the
fragrance which did not yield itself to a few minutes of this
distillation. As I removed the cork there gently arose the scent of
thyme, and of rose petals long pressed between the leaves of old, old
books--a scent memorable of days ancient to us, which in past lives of
sedges would count but a moment. In an instant it passed, drowned in
the following smell of bruised stem. But I had surprised the odor of
this age-old growth, as evanescent as the faint sound of the breeze
sifting through the cluster of leafless stalks. I felt certain that
Eryops, although living among horserushes and ancient sedges, never
smelled or listened to them, and a glow of satisfaction came over me
at the thought that perhaps I represented an advance on this funny old
forebear of mine; but then I thought of the little bees, drawn from
afar by the scent, and I returned to my usual sense of human futility,
which