how to smile. He was a familiar figure, tramping
from dawn to dusk with Kerry at his heels, for the dog obeyed Mary
Virginia's command literally. He looked upon John Flint as his special
charge, and made himself his fourlegged red shadow. I am sure that if
we had seen Kerry appear in the streets of Appleboro without John
Flint, we would have incontinently stopped work, sounded a general
alarm, and gone to hunt for his body. And to have seen John Flint
without Kerry would have called forth condolences.

Sometimes--when I had time--I went with him moth-hunting at night; and
never, never could either of us forget those enchanted hours under the
stars!

We moved in a quiet fresh and dewy, with the night wind upon us like a
benediction. Sometimes we skirted a cypress swamp and saw the shallow
black water with blacker trees reflected upon its bosom, and heard the
frogs' canorous quarrelings, and the stealthy rustlings of creatures
of the dark. We crossed dreaming fields, and smelt leaves and grasses
and sleeping flowers. We saw the heart of the wood bared to the magic
of the moon, which revealed a hidden and haunting beauty of places
commonplace enough by day; as if the secret souls of things showed
themselves only in the holy dark.

For the world into which we stepped for a space was not our world, but
the fairy world of the Little People, the world of the Children of the
Moon. And oh, the moths! Now it was a tiger, with his body banded with
yellow and his white opaque delicate wings spotted with black; now the
great green silken Luna with long curved tails bordered with lilac or
gold, and vest of ermine; now some quivering Catocala, with afterwings
spread to show orange and black and crimson; now the golden-brown Io,
with one great black velvet spot; and now some rarer, shyer fellow
over which we gloated.

How they flashed and fluttered about the lantern, or circled about the
trees upon which the feast had been spread! The big yellow-banded
sphinx whirred hither and thither on his owl-like wings, his large
eyes glowing like rubies, hung quivering above some flower for a
moment, and then was off again as swift as thought. The light drew the
great Regalis, all burnished tawny brown, striped and spotted with raw
gold; and the Cynthia, banded with lilac, her heavy body tufted with
white. The darkness in which they moved, the light which, for a moment
revealed them, seemed to make their colors _alive_; for they show no
such