“Some of the best and brightest among men have given all the years of their lives to just that finding out and knowing more—­and they found their years too few and short for the work.  But such help as you need and we can get, you shall have, please God!” said I.

“I’m ready for the word to start, chief.”  And heaven knows he was.

His passion transformed him; he forgot himself; took his mind off himself and his affairs and grievances and hatreds and fears; and thus had chance to expand and to grow, in those following years of patientest effort, of untiring research and observance, of lovingest study.  Days in the open woods and fields burned his pale skin a good mahogany, and stamped upon it the windswept freshness of out of doors.  The hunted and suspicious glance faded from his eyes, which took on more and more the student’s absorbed intensity; the mouth lost its sinister straightness; and while it retained an uncompromising firmness, it learned how to smile.  He was a familiar figure, tramping from dawn to dusk with Kerry at his heels, for the dog obeyed Mary Virginia’s command literally.  He looked upon John Flint as his special charge, and made himself his fourlegged red shadow.  I am sure that if we had seen Kerry appear in the streets of Appleboro without John Flint, we would have incontinently stopped work, sounded a general alarm, and gone to hunt for his body.  And to have seen John Flint without Kerry would have called forth condolences.

Sometimes—­when I had time—­I went with him moth-hunting at night; and never, never could either of us forget those enchanted hours under the stars!

We moved in a quiet fresh and dewy, with the night wind upon us like a benediction.  Sometimes we skirted a cypress swamp and saw the shallow black water with blacker trees reflected upon its bosom, and heard the frogs’ canorous quarrelings, and the stealthy rustlings of creatures of the dark.  We crossed dreaming fields, and smelt leaves and grasses and sleeping flowers.  We saw the heart of the wood bared to the magic of the moon, which revealed a hidden and haunting beauty of places commonplace enough by day; as if the secret souls of things showed themselves only in the holy dark.

For the world into which we stepped for a space was not our world, but the fairy world of the Little People, the world of the Children of the Moon.  And oh, the moths!  Now it was a tiger, with his body banded with yellow and his white opaque delicate wings spotted with black; now the great green silken Luna with long curved tails bordered with lilac or gold, and vest of ermine; now some quivering Catocala, with afterwings spread to show orange and black and crimson; now the golden-brown Io, with one great black velvet spot; and now some rarer, shyer fellow over which we gloated.