WHEN I came again to this enchanted mountain, above the steaming plains, the first thing I did was to wander in the garden, amid the sweet-smelling blossoms and the bees and butterflies, and feast my eyes upon the ever-new loveliness of the changeless hills, the changeful sky and sea, that crowd the prospect with a thousand pictures of infinite beauty and inspiring grandeur. Then I saw a perfect rose, a rose of divine, deep colour—betwixt rubies and red wine—of the texture of finest velvet, and I gathered it. Once, long ago, at least so it seems, you gave me the fellow of this rose, plucked from the same tree. To me this flower will always suggest you, for, beyond the association, there are certain characteristics which you share with it, “dark and true and tender,” a rare sweetness of perfume and, in the heart of the rose, a slumbering passion, the like of which will some day wake you to the joy or the sorrow of life. I have treasured that sweet-scented blossom as long as it would stay with me; and now, when the petals are falling, I see that they are the counterpart of three rose-petals that had travelled from far over sea in a letter from you. They came the bearers of their own message, and now I seem to read it. Have I been very dense, or am I only fatuous now? Why can’t they speak, these things you have touched, or do they speak and I lack understanding? At least you sent them, and that is much from you. I am grateful, and if I am a prey to vain imaginings, you will forgive me, and understand that I did not, presumptuously and with indecent haste, set about the construction of a castle that, even now, has but my wish for its unsubstantial foundation.

Last night, this morning rather, for it was between midnight and 1 A.M., I was reading that very weird story about a phantom dog. I was deeply engrossed in the weirdest part of it, when I heard a buzzing noise, and in a dark corner behind the piano I saw a pair of very strange eyes approaching and receding. They were like small coals of fire, extraordinarily brilliant, with a pinkish flame, shedding light as well as containing it. I realised that they were the eyes of what looked like a very large moth, whose wings never ceased to move with marvellous rapidity.

My chair was touching a table on which was a long vase of perfume-laden lilies, white lilies with yellow hearts, and by-and-by the moth flew to the flowers and stood, poised in air, before a lily-blossom. There were two very bright lights on the table, and the creature was within two feet of me, so I saw it plainly enough. The wings never for an instant stopped their vibration, and it was so rapid that I could not tell their form or colour. Once directly opposite the flower, the moth produced a delicate proboscis, which it inserted into the blossom, and then slowly pushed it right up the stamen, apparently in search of honey. When extended, this feeler was of quite abnormal length, at least two or three inches. What, however, surprised me was that, having withdrawn the probe (for that was what it looked like, a very fine steel or wire probe, such as dentists use), the instrument seemed to go back into the moth’s head, or wherever it came from, to be again extended to sound the depths of another blossom. There! it is past midnight, and I hear the buzzing in the next room; here it comes; and I can examine the creature again. Alas! what a disappointment: this is a horned beetle. I thought it made over-much noise for my interesting friend. Now to continue my tale.

I observed the moth had a large, dark, cigar-shaped body, with two longish antennÆ, much stouter than the proboscis, and infinitely shorter. After pursuing its researches into the internal economy of several lilies, the thing flew into my face, and I ought to have caught and examined it, for then the feeler had disappeared; but I was surprised and rather alarmed, and I thought it would return to the flowers, and I could again watch, and, if necessary, catch it. It made, however, for a dark corner, and then buzzed about the wooden ceiling till it came to an iron hook from which hung a basket of ferns. I was carefully watching it all the time, and at the hook it disappeared, the buzzing ceased, and I concluded the creature had gone into a hole where it probably lived. To-day, in daylight, I examined the ceiling all round the hook, but there was no hole anywhere.

Now is this the beginning of the dog business, and am I to be haunted by those fiery eyes, by the ceaseless clatter of those buzzing wings, and the long supple feeler that suggests the tortures of dentistry, and may probe deep into the recesses of my brain? It can’t, I think, be liver, for I have not yet learnt on which side of me that useful organ lies, and it is not drink. If it is only a moth of a rather uncommon kind, I suppose the fire in its eyes is to light it through the darkness; but I never before saw a moth going into raptures over flowers, and I can’t yet understand where it puts away that instrument of torture, unless it winds it round a bobbin, inside its head or its body, when not using it. It reminds me of a man I saw swallowing swords at the Aquarium. I was quite willing to admire and believe, until he took up a sword, the blade of which, by outside measurement, stretched from his mouth nearly to his knee, and swallowed it to the hilt at one gulp. Then I doubted; and the knotty sticks, umbrellas, and bayonets, which he afterwards disposed of with consummate ease, only increased my dislike for him. Still this proboscis is not an umbrella, and though it is about twice as long as the moth itself, and seems to come out of the end of its nose, I know so little of the internal arrangements of these creatures that I dare say this one can, by winding the instrument up like the spring of a watch, find room for it in its head. Why the thing won’t keep its wings still, and sit quietly on the petals of the flower while it thrusts that probe into the lily’s nerve-centres, I can’t imagine. Then one could examine it quietly, and not go to bed in fear of a deadly nightmare.

Perhaps, after all, it is the result of reading about that “Thing too much,” that starving, murderous cur, at 1 A.M.; if it is, I had better go to bed now, for it has just struck the hour. Am I wrong about the message of the rose? You see how hard I try to do your bidding.