But pretty as they are, it is their number, even more than their beauty, that delights the eye.

Their gay and noiseless movement as they glance through the air, crossing each other in chequered maze, is very beautiful.

The humming-bird is another pretty summer toy; but they are not sufficiently numerous, nor do they live enough on the wing to render them so important a feature in the transatlantic show, as the rainbow-tinted butterflies.

The fire-fly was a far more brilliant novelty.

In moist situations, or before a storm, they are very numerous, and in the dark sultry evening of a burning day, when all employment was impossible, I have often found it a pastime to watch their glancing light, now here, now there; now seen, now gone; shooting past with the rapidity of lightning, and looking like a shower of falling stars, blown about in the breeze of evening.
In one of our excursions we encountered and slew a copperhead snake.