A Butterfly Episode by Grant Allen — Read

HE was an airy, fairy orange-tip. He had just emerged from the chrysalis, and stood poised for a moment, like a hesitating Psyche, on the flat-topped blossoming branches of a big white cow-parsnip. For the most part, he sat there, irresolute, plimming his untried wings, and half opening them tentatively from time to time, as if wondering to himself how the dickens they got there. And well might he wonder; for remember, he was bred a common green caterpillar. Never till this moment did it dawn across his mind that such a motion as flight could exist in the universe. So there he sat still, uncertain what strange change had come over him unawares. Six well-formed legs, in place of the creeping suckers on which he crawled in his youth; and what could these thin vans mean-these light and airy vans, that moved so dubiously on his soft woolly shoulders?

While his wings remained erect and closed, the under surface alone showed; and that was chequered green and white, like the flowers he sat upon. Indeed, so exactly did groundwork and insect harmonize with one another in hue and markings, that even a quick eye might easily have passed my orange-tip by unnoticed, were it not for the quivering movement of those uncertain wings, whose opening and shutting betrayed him, as I passed, to my scrutinizing survey. And this in itself was odd. For "How did he know," thought I-"he who till lately was but a small green grub, feeding on the lush leaves and stems of cresses-that he ought now to make straight, on his emergence from the chrysalis, for this white-flowered cow-parsnip; which, indeed, is the favourite perching-place of all his race, and which effectually conceals him from the prying eyes of birds that fain would prey upon him, yet of whose very existence he, a crawling caterpillar, was till this moment ignorant?