had mourned him there, nights untold.  She could not go on.  She skirted the back of the garden, crossed a field, and came out on the road.  Soon she reached the Limberlost.  She hunted until she found the old trail, then followed it stumbling over logs and through clinging vines and grasses.  The heavy boots clumped on her feet, overhanging branches whipped her face and pulled her hair.  But her eyes were on the sky as she went straining into the night, hoping to find signs of a living creature on wing.

By and by she began to see the wavering flight of something she thought near the right size.  She had no idea where she was, but she stopped, lighted a lantern and hung it as high as she could reach.  A little distance away she placed the second and then the third.  The objects came nearer and sick with disappointment she saw that they were bats.  Crouching in the damp swamp grasses, without a thought of snakes or venomous insects, she waited, her eyes roving from lantern to lantern.  Once she thought a creature of high flight dropped near the lard oil light, so she arose breathlessly waiting, but either it passed or it was an illusion.  She glanced at the old lantern, then at the new, and was on her feet in an instant creeping close.  Something large as a small bird was fluttering around.  Mrs. Comstock began to perspire, while her hand shook wildly.  Closer she crept and just as she reached for it, something similar swept past and both flew away together.

Mrs. Comstock set her teeth and stood shivering.  For a long time the locusts rasped, the whip-poor-wills cried and a steady hum of night life throbbed in her ears.  Away in the sky she saw something coming when it was no larger than a falling leaf.  Straight toward the light it flew.  Mrs. Comstock began to pray aloud.

“This way, O Lord!  Make it come this way!  Please!  O Lord, send it lower!”

The moth hesitated at the first light, then slowly, easily it came toward the second, as if following a path of air.  It touched a leaf near the lantern and settled.  As Mrs. Comstock reached for it a thin yellow spray wet her hand and the surrounding leaves.  When its wings raised above its back, her fingers came together.  She held the moth to the light.  It was nearer brown than yellow, and she remembered having seen some like it in the boxes that afternoon.  It was not the one needed to complete the collection, but Elnora might want it, so Mrs. Comstock held on.  Then the Almighty was kind, or nature was sufficient, as you look at it, for following the law of its being when disturbed, the moth again threw the spray by which some suppose it attracts its kind, and liberally sprinkled Mrs. Comstock’s dress front and arms.  From that instant, she became the best moth bait ever invented.  Every Polyphemus in range hastened to her, and other fluttering creatures of night followed.  The influx came her way.  She snatched wildly here and there until she had one in each hand and no place to put them.  She could see more coming, and her aching heart, swollen with the strain of long excitement, hurt pitifully.  She prayed in broken exclamations that did not always sound reverent, but never was human soul in more intense earnest.