“An’ you mean to tell me to my face,” said a scandalized farmer, watching me assorting and naming the specimens taken from my field box, “you mean to tell me you’re givin’ every one o’ them bugs a name, same’s a baptized Christian?  Adam named every livin’ thing, an’ Adam called them things Caterpillars an’ Butterflies.  If it suited him an’ Eve and God A’mighty to have ’em called that an’ nothin’ else, looks to me it had oughter suit anybody that’s got a grain o’real religion.  If you go to call ’em anythin’ else it’s sinnin’ agin the Bible.  I’ve heard all my life you Cath’lics don’t take as much stock in the Scripters as you’d oughter, but this thing o’callin’ a wurrum Adam named plain Caterpillar a—­a—­what’d you say the dum beast’s name was? My sufferin’ Savior! is jest about the wust dern foolishness yet!  I lay it at the Pope’s door, every mite o’ it, an’ you’d better believe he’ll have to answer for sech carryin’s on, some o’ these days!”

So many other things having been laid at the Pope’s door, I held my peace and made no futile attempt to clear the Holy Father of the dark suspicion of having perpetrated their names upon certain of the American lepidoptera.

I had yet other darker madnesses; had I not been seen spreading upon trees with a whitewash brush a mixture of brown sugar, stale beer, and rum?

Asked to explain this lunatic proceeding I could only say that I was sugaring for moths; these airy fairy gentlemen having a very human liking for a “wee drappie o’t.”

“That amiable failin’,” Major Appleby Cartwright decided, “is a credit to them an’ commends them to a respectful hearin’.  On its face it would seem to admit them to the ancient an’ honorable brotherhood of convivial man.  But, suh, there’s another side to this question, an’ it’s this:—­a creature that’s got six perfectly good legs, not to mention wings, an’ still can’t carry his liquor without bein’ caught, deserves his fate.  It’s not in my line to offer suggestions to an allwise Providence, or I might hint that a scoop-net an’ a killing jar in pickle for some two-legged topers out huntin’ free drinks wouldn’t be such a bad idea at all.”

But as I pursued my buggy way—­and displayed, save in this one particular, what might truthfully be called ordinary common sense—­people gradually grew accustomed to it, looking upon me as a mild and harmless lunatic whose inoffensive mania might safely be indulged—­nay, even humored.  In consequence I was from time to time inundated with every common thing that creeps, crawls, and flies.  I accepted gifts of bugs and caterpillars that filled my mother with disgust and Clelie with horror; both of them hesitated to come into my study, and I have known Clelie to be afraid to go to bed of a night because the great red-horned “Hickory devil” was downstairs in a box, and she was firmly convinced that this innocent worm harbored a cold-blooded desire to crawl upstairs and bite her.  That silly woman will depart this life in the firm faith that all crawling creatures came into the world with the single-hearted hope of biting her, above all other mortals; and that having achieved the end for which they were created, both they and she will immediately curl up and die.