“Where the Sam Hill,” he blazed, “do all these footy little devils come from, anyhow?  Where am I to put a beast of a bug when the next one that’s exactly like it is entirely different the next time you look at it?  There’s too much beginning and no end at all to this game!”

For all that, he followed them up.  I saw with pure joy that he refused to dismiss anything carelessly, while he scorned to split hairs.  He had a regular course of procedure when he was puzzled.  First he turned the new insect over and over and glared at it from every possible angle; then he rumpled his hair, gritted his teeth, squared his shoulders and hurled himself into work.

There was, for instance, the common Dione Vanillae, that splendid Gulf Fritillary which haunts all the highways of the South.  She’s a long-wing, but she’s not a Heliconian; she’s a silver-spot, but she’s not an Argynnis.  She bears a striking family likeness to her fine relations, but she has certain structural peculiarities which differentiate her.  Whose word should he take for this, and why?  Wherein lay those differences?  He began, patiently, with her cylinder-shaped yellow-brown, orange-spotted caterpillar, on the purple passion flowers in our garden; he watched it change into a dark-brown chrysalis marked with a few pale spots; he saw emerge from this the red-robed lady herself, with her long fulvous forewings, and her shorter hind wings smocked with black velvet, and her under-frock flushed with pinkish orange and spangled with silver.  And yet, in spite of her long marvelous tongue—­he was beginning to find out that no tool he had ever seen, and but few that God Himself makes, is so wonderful as a butterfly’s tongue—­she hadn’t been able to tell him that about herself which he most wished to find out. That called for a deeper knowledge than he as yet possessed.

But he knew that other men knew.  And he had to know.  He meant to know.  For the work gripped him as it does those marked and foreordained for its service.  That marvelous world in which the Little People dwell—­a world so absolutely different from ours that it might well be upon another planet—­began to open, slowly, slowly, one of its many mysterious doors, allowing him just glimpse enough of what magic lay beyond to fire his heart and to whet his appetite.  And he couldn’t break into that world with a jimmy.  It was burglar-proof.  That portal was so impervious to even the facile fingers of Slippy McGee, that John Flint must pay the inevitable and appropriate toll to enter!

Westmoreland had replaced his crutches with a wooden leg, and you might see him stumping about our grounds, minutely examining the underside of shrubs and bushes, the bark of trees, poking into corners and crannies, or scraping in the mold under the fallen leaves by the fences, for things which no longer filled him with aversion and disgust, but with the student’s interest and pleasure.