the world of the dead.  Who save a cabbage-grower has any feeling against butterflies?  And yet in folk-lore it is to the butterfly rather than to the moth that is assigned the ghostly part.  In Ireland they have a legend about a priest who had not believed that men had souls, but, on being converted, announced that a living thing would be seen soaring up from his body when he died—­in proof that his earlier scepticism had been wrong.  Sure enough, when he lay dead, a beautiful creature “with four snow-white wings” rose from his body and fluttered round his head.  “And this,” we are told, “was the first butterfly that was ever seen in Ireland; and now all men know that the butterflies are the souls of the dead waiting for the moment when they may enter Purgatory.”  In the Solomon Islands, they say, it used to be the custom, when a man was about to die, for him to announce that he was about to transmigrate into a butterfly or some other creature.  The members of his family, on meeting a butterfly afterwards, would exclaim:  “This is papa,” and offer him a coco-nut.  The members of an English family in like circumstances would probably say:  “Have a banana.”  In certain tribes of Assam the dead are believed to return in the shape of butterflies or house-flies, and for this reason no one will kill them.  On the other hand, in Westphalia the butterfly plays the part given to the scapegoat in other countries, and on St Peter’s Day, in February, it is publicly expelled with rhyme and ritual.  Elsewhere, as in Samoa—­I do not know where I found all these facts—­probably in The Golden Bough—­the butterfly has been feared as a god, and to catch a butterfly was to run the risk of being struck dead.  The moth, for all I know, may be the centre of as many legends but I have not met them.  It may be, however, that in many of the legends the moth and the butterfly are not very clearly distinguished.  To most of us it seems easy enough to distinguish between them; the English butterfly can always be known, for instance, by his clubbed horns.  But this distinction does not hold with regard to the entire world of butterflies—­a world so populous and varied that thirteen thousand species have already been discovered, and entomologists hope one day to classify twice as many more.  Even in these islands, indeed, most of us do not judge a moth chiefly by its lack of clubbed horns.  It is for us the thing that flies by night and eats holes in our clothes.  We are not even afraid of it in all circumstances.  Our terror is an indoors terror.  We are on good terms with it in poetry, and play with the thought of

     The desire of the moth for the star.

We remember that it is for the moths that the pallid jasmine smells so sweetly by night.  There is no shudder in our minds when we read: 

     And when white moths were on the wing,
       And moth-like stars were flickering out,
     I dropped the berry in a stream,
       And caught a little silver trout.