How they flashed and fluttered about the lantern, or circled about the trees upon which the feast had been spread!  The big yellow-banded sphinx whirred hither and thither on his owl-like wings, his large eyes glowing like rubies, hung quivering above some flower for a moment, and then was off again as swift as thought.  The light drew the great Regalis, all burnished tawny brown, striped and spotted with raw gold; and the Cynthia, banded with lilac, her heavy body tufted with white.  The darkness in which they moved, the light which, for a moment revealed them, seemed to make their colors alive; for they show no such glow and glory in the common day; they pale when the moon pales, and when the sun is up they are merely moths; they are no longer the fantastic, glittering, gorgeous, throbbing Children of the Dark.

Home we would go, at an hour when the morning star blazed like a lighted torch, and the pearl-gray sky was flushing with pink.  No haul he had ever made could have given him such joy as the treasures brought home in dawns like these, so free of evil that his heart was washed in the night dew and swept by the night wind.

My mother, after her pleasant, housewifely fashion, baked a big iced cake for him on the day he replaced his clumsy wooden peg with the life-like artificial limb he himself had earned and paid for.  I had wished more than once to hasten this desirable day; but prudently restrained myself, thinking it best for him to work forward unaided.  It had taken months of patient work, of frugality, and planning, and counting, and saving, to cover a sum which, once on a time, he might have gotten in an hour’s evil effort.  And it represented no small achievement and marked no small advance, so that it was really the feast day we made of it.  That limb restored him to a dignity he seemed to have abdicated.  It hid his obvious misfortune—­you could not at first glance tell that he was a cripple, a something of which he had been morbidly conscious and savagely resentful.  He would never again be able to run, or even to walk rapidly for any length of time, although he covered the ground at a good and steady gait; and as he grew more and more accustomed to the limb there was only a slight limp to distinguish him.  The use of the stick he thought best to carry became perfunctory.  I have seen Kerry carrying that stick when his master had forgotten all about it.

Meeting him now upon the streets, plainly but really well-dressed, scrupulously brushed, his linen immaculate, and with his trimmed red beard, his eyeglasses, and his soft hat, he conveyed the impression of being a professional man—­say a pleasantly homely and scholarly college professor.  There was a fixed sentiment in Appleboro that I knew very much more about Mr. Flint’s past than I would tell—­which was perfectly true, and went undenied by me; that he had seen better days; that he had been the black sheep of a good family, gotten into a scrape of some sort, and had then taken to traveling a rough road into a far country, eating husks with the swine, like many another prodigal; and that aware of this I had kept him with me until he found himself again.