My love for the butterflies took on the form of adoration.  There was not a delicate, gaudy, winged creature of day that did not make so strong an appeal to my heart as to be almost painful.  It seemed to me that the most exquisite thoughts of God for our pleasure were materialized in their beauty.  My soul always craved colour, and more brilliancy could be found on one butterfly wing than on many flower faces.  I liked to slip along the bloom-bordered walks of that garden and stand spell-bound, watching a black velvet butterfly, which trailed wings painted in white, red, and green, as it clambered over a clump of sweet-williams, and indeed, the flowers appeared plain compared with it!  Butterflies have changed their habits since then.  They fly so high!  They are all among the treetops now.  They used to flit around the cinnamon pinks, larkspur, ragged-robins and tiger lilies, within easy reach of little fingers, every day.  I called them `flying flowers,’ and it was a pretty conceit, for they really were more delicate in texture and brighter in colouring than the garden blooms.

Having been taught that God created the heavens, earth and all things therein, I understood it to mean a literal creation of each separate thing and creature, as when my father cut down a tree and hewed it into a beam.  I would spend hours sitting so immovably among the flowers of our garden that the butterflies would mistake me for a plant and alight on my head and hands, while I strove to conceive the greatness of a Being who could devise and colour all those different butterfly wings.  I would try to decide whether He created the birds, flowers, or butterflies first; ultimately coming to the conclusion that He put His most exquisite material into the butterflies, and then did the best He could with what remained, on the birds and flowers.

In my home there was a cellar window on the south, covered with wire screening, that was my individual property.  Father placed a box beneath it so that I could reach the sill easily, and there were very few butterflies or insects common to eastern North America a specimen of which had not spent some days on that screen, feasted on leaves and flowers, drunk from saucers of sweetened water, been admired and studied in minutest detail, and then set free to enjoy life as before.  With Whitman, “I never was possessed with a mania for killing things.”  I had no idea of what families they were, and I supplied my own names.  The Monarch was the Brown Velvet; the Viceroy was his Cousin; the Argynnis was the Silver Spotted; and the Papilio Ajax was the Ribbon butterfly, in my category.  There was some thought of naming Ajax, Dolly Varden; but on close inspection it seemed most to resemble the gayly striped ribbons my sisters wore.