He had taken over a correspondence that had since become voluminous, and which included more and more names that stood for very much.  Sometimes when I read aloud a passage from a letter that praised him, he turned red, and writhed like a little boy whose ears are being relentlessly washed by his elders.

By this time he had learned to really classify; heavens, how unerringly he could place an insect in its proper niche!  It was a sort of sixth sense with him.  That cold, clear, incisive power of brain which on a time had made Slippy McGee the greatest cracksman in America, was, trained and disciplined in a better cause, to make John Flint in later years an international authority upon lepidoptera, an observer to whom other observers deferred, a naturalist whose dictum settled disputed points.  And I knew it, I foresaw it!

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa! I grew as vain over his enlarging powers as if I had been the Mover of the Game, not a pawn.  I felt, gloriously, that I had not lived for nothing.  A great naturalist is not born every day, no, nor every year, nor even every century.  And I had caught me a great burglar and I had hatched me a great naturalist!  My Latin soul was enraptured with this ironic anomaly.  I could not choose but love the man for that.

I really had some cause for vanity.  Others than myself had been gradually drawn to the unassuming Butterfly Man.  Westmoreland loved him.  A sympathetic listener who seldom contradicted, but often shrewdly suggested, Flint somehow knew how to bring out the big doctor’s best; and in consequence found himself in contact with a mind above all meanness and a nature as big and clean as a spray-swept beach.

“Oh, my, my, my, what a surgeon gone to waste!” Westmoreland would lament, watching the long, sure fingers at work.  “Well, I suppose it’s all for the best that Father De Rance beat me to you—­at least you’ve done less damage learning your trade.”  So absorbed would he become that he sometimes forget cross patients who were possibly fuming themselves into a fever over his delay.

Eustis, who had met the Butterfly Man on the country roads and had stopped his horse for an informal chat, would thereafter go out of his way for a talk with him.  These two reticent men liked each other immensely.  At opposite poles, absolutely dissimilar, they yet had odd similarities and meeting-points.  Eustis was nothing if not practical; he was never too busy to forget to be kind.  Books and pamphlets that neither Flint nor I could have hoped to possess found their way to us through him.  Scientific periodicals and the better magazines came regularly to John Flint’s address.  That was Eustis’s way.  This friendship put the finishing touch upon the Butterfly Man’s repute.  He was my associate, and my mother was devoted to him.  Miss Sally Ruth, whose pet pear-tree he had saved and whose pigeons he had cured, approved of him, too, and said so with her usual openness.  Westmoreland