“All Buckrahs is funny in dey haids,” Daddy January consoled her when she complained to him about it.  “Dey gets all kind o’ fool notions ‘bout all kind o’ fool t’ings.  You ain’t got to feel so bad—­de Jedge is lots wuss’n yo’ boss is.  Yo’ boss kin see de bugs he run atter, but my boss talk ‘bout some kind o’ bug he call Germ.  I ax um what kind o’ bug is dat; an’ he ‘low you can’t see um wid yo’ eye.  I ain’t say so to de Jedge, but I ‘low when you see bug you can’t see wid yo’ eye, you best not seem um ‘tall—­case he must be some kind o’ spook, an’ Gawd knows I ain’t want to see no spook.  Ef de bug ain’t no spook, den he mus’ be eenside yo’ haid, ‘stead o’ outside um, an’ to hab bug on de eenside o’ yo’ haid is de wuss kind o’ bad luck.  Anyhow, nobody but Buckrah talk an’ ack like dat, niggers is got mo’ sense.”

We found, presently, a ready and a steady sale for our extra stock.  We could supply caterpillars, butterflies and moths, or chrysalids and cocoons; we had some rather scarce ones; and then, our unmounted specimens were so perfect, and our mounted ones so exquisitely done, that we had but little trouble in disposing of them.  Under the hand of John Flint these last were really works of art.  Not for nothing had he boasted that he was handy with his fingers.

The pretty common forms, framed hovering lifelike over delicately pressed ferns and flowers, found even a readier market, for they were really beautiful.  Money had begun to come in—­not largely, it is true, but still steadily and surely.  You must know how to handle your stock, and you must be in touch with your market—­scientists, students, collectors,—­and this, of course, takes time.  We could supply the larger dealers, too, although they pay less, and we had a modest advertisement in one or two papers published for the profession, which brought us orders.  But let no one imagine that it is an easy task to handle these frail bodies, these gossamer wings, so that naturalists and collectors are glad to get them.  Once or twice we lost valuable shipments.

Long since—­in the late spring, to be exact, John Flint had moved out of the Guest Room, needed for other occupants, into a two-roomed outbuilding across the garden.  Some former pastor had had it built for an oratory and retreat, but now, covered with vines, it had stood for many years unused, save as a sort of lumber room.

When the troublesome question of where we might properly house him had arisen, my mother hit upon these unused rooms as by direct inspiration.  She had them cleaned, repainted, scoured, and turned into a pleasant well-lighted, airy workroom and living-room combined, and a smaller and rather austere bedroom, with an inexpensive but very good head of Christ over the mantel, and an old, old carved crucifix on the wall beside the white iron bed.  Laurence took from his own room a Morris chair, whose somewhat frayed cushions my mother neatly re-covered.  Mary Virginia contributed a rug, as well as dressing-gown and slippers.  Miss Sally Ruth gave him outright a brand-new Bible, and loaned him an old cedar-wood wardrobe which had been her great-grandmother’s, and which still smelt delicately of generations of rose-leaved and lavendered linen.