“Not the slightest use,” said Julian; “they only grow at certain elevations, and would be dead before you got down.”
“Isn’t it strange, Violet, that Nature should fling such a tender and exquisite gem so high up among these awful hills, where so few eyes see them?”
“Just look,” said Julian, “how the moss and the grass seem to be illuminated with them, as though the heavens were golden, and stars in it were of blue.”
While they talked, Cyril dashed past them with all the ardour of a young entomologist in full chase of a little mountain-ringlet, which he soon caught and pinned on the top of his straw hat. In a few minutes more he had added a great fritillery to his collection, and it gave him no trouble to pick out the finest of the superb lazy-flying Apollos, which quickly shared the same fate.
“Here’s another for you, Cyril,” said Eva, pointing to a gorgeous peacock-butterfly which had settled amicably by a bee on the pink-and-downy coronet of a great thistle.
“Oh, I don’t want that; one can get it any day in England; here though, look at this lovely burnet-moth,” he cried, as the blue-and-red-winged little creature settled on the same thistle-head.
“What a shame to disturb that beautiful Psyche,” said Julian, as Cyril dashed his cap over the prey, and the peacock fluttered off; “it was enjoying itself so intensely in the sunshine, opening and shutting its wings in unmitigated contentment.” But Cyril had secured his moth without heeding the remark, and was now twenty yards ahead.
A sudden roar of sound stopped him, and he waited to ask the rest, “if they had heard the thunder?”
“It wasn’t thunder, but the rush of an avalanche,” said Kennedy; “there, you may see it still on the side of the Jungfrau.”
“What, those little white streaks, which look like a mountain torrent?”