"Is it alive?" she repeated, more earnestly than before.

"Judge for yourself," said Owen Warland, who stood gazing in her face
with fixed attention.

The butterfly now flung itself upon the air, fluttered round Annie's
head, and soared into a distant region of the parlor, still making
itself perceptible to sight by the starry gleam in which the motion of
its wings enveloped it. The infant on the floor followed its course
with his sagacious little eyes. After flying about the room, it
returned in a spiral curve and settled again on Annie's finger.

"But is it alive?" exclaimed she again; and the finger on which the
gorgeous mystery had alighted was so tremulous that the butterfly was
forced to balance himself with his wings. "Tell me if it be alive, or
whether you created it."

"Wherefore ask who created it, so it be beautiful?" replied Owen
Warland. "Alive? Yes, Annie; it may well be said to possess life, for
it has absorbed my own being into itself; and in the secret of that
butterfly, and in its beauty,--which is not merely outward, but deep as
its whole system,--is represented the intellect, the imagination, the
sensibility, the soul of an Artist of the Beautiful! Yes; I created it.
But"--and here his countenance somewhat changed--"this butterfly is not
now to me what it was when I beheld it afar off in the daydreams of my
youth."

"Be it what it may, it is a pretty plaything," said the blacksmith,
grinning with childlike delight. "I wonder whether it would condescend
to alight on such a great clumsy finger as mine? Hold it hither, Annie."

By the artist's direction, Annie touched her finger's tip to that of
her husband; and, after a momentary delay, the butterfly fluttered from
one to the other. It preluded a second flight by a similar, yet not
precisely the same, waving of wings as in the first experiment; then,
ascending from the blacksmith's stalwart finger, it rose in a gradually
enlarging curve to the ceiling, made one wide sweep around the room,
and returned with an undulating movement to the point whence it had
started.

"Well, that does beat all nature!" cried Robert Danforth, bestowing the
heartiest praise that he could find expression for; and, indeed, had he
paused there, a man of finer words and nicer perception could not
easily have said more. "That goes beyond me, I confess. But what then?
There is more real use in one downright blow of my sledge hammer than
in the whole five years' labor th