Out from the door of the house burst the laughing, shouting little lad. He raced across the grass and halted by the tulip-bed; there, with yet more shouts of full-throated baby laughter, he turned to look back at his young mother, racing after him, standing now in the doorway. His head was yellow as a flower, almost as yellow as the tulips, and the spun-silk, glittering hair of five years old curled tight in a manner of aureole. As the girl gazed at him, glorying in him, suddenly the sun came brilliantly from under a cloud, and, as if at a signal, out of the clover-patch at the edge of the lawn stormed a myriad of butterflies and floated about the golden head.
“Oh, the butterflies take you for a flower, Dicky,” cried the girl.
The little chap stood quite still, smiling and blinking through the winged sunshine, and then, behold, three or four of the lovely things fluttered down on his head. The young woman flashed out and caught him and hugged him till he squealed lustily.
“Don’t, muvver,” remonstrated Dicky. “You’ll scare my ’ittle birds. They ’ike us, muvver.”
“It’s good luck to have a butterfly light on you,” she informed him, and then, in a flash of some unplaced memory, with the quick mysticism of her Irish blood: “A butterfly is the symbol of immortality.”
“’Esh,” agreed Dicky gravely. “’Esh a ’sympum—” and there he lost himself, and threw back his head and roared rich laughter at the droll long word.
“It must have looked pretty,” the boy’s father agreed that night. “I wonder what sort they were. I used to collect them. There’s a book—” He went to the shelves and searched. “This is it.” There were pages here and there of colored pictures. “No. 2,” he read, and pointed to a list. “The Cloudless Sulphur. Were they solid yellow?” He turned a page. “‘The Cloudless Sulphur,’” he began reading aloud. “‘Large, two and a half inches. Wings uniform bright canary color. Likely to light on yellow flowers; social; it flies in masses and congregates on flowers. Habit of migrating in flocks from Southeast to Northwest in the spring and from Northwest to Southeast in the autumn. Food, cassia, etc. Family, Pieridæ.’ That’s the fellow,” decided the boy’s father, learned in butterflies. “A Pierid. ‘Many butterflies hide under clover,’” he read along, “‘and down in grasses—pass the nights there. Some sorts only come out freely in sunshine.’ Didn’t you say the sun came?”
“All at once. They flew up then as if at a command.” She nodded. “That’s exactly the creature. And where it says about lighting on flowers of the same color—they did take Dicky’s head for a flower, didn’t they, Tom?”
“It certainly seems as if they did.” The man smiled. “Kentucky is likely on the line of their spring migration Northwesterly. I reckon Dicky’s friends are the Cloudless Sulphur.”
Dicky’s father died when the boy was eleven. The years ran on. Life adjusted itself as life must, and the child grew, as that other Child twenty centuries back, in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man. There might have been more boys in America as upstanding in body and character, as loving and clever and strong and merry, as beautiful within and without as her boy, the woman considered, but she had never seen one. His very faults were dear human qualities which made him more adorable. With his tenderness and his roughness, his teachableness and his stubbornness, his terror of sentiment and his gusts of heavenly sweet love-making, the boy satisfied her to the end of her soul. Buoyancy found her again, and youth, and the joy of an uphill road with this gay, strong comrade keeping step along it. Then the war came. All his life she had missed no chance to make her citizen first of all things an American. And now that carefully fed flame of patriotism flamed to cover all America.