Here and there also fluttered hundreds of butterflies of
different species, especially in the neighborhood of the brooks that
crossed the factory; but that was rather Cousin Benedict's affair than
little Jack's, and the latter regretted greatly not being taller,
so as to look over the walls. Alas! where was his poor friend, Dick
Sand--he who had brought him so high up in the "Pilgrim's" masts? How
he would have followed him on the branches of those trees, whose tops
rose to more than a hundred feet! What good times they would have had
together!
Cousin Benedict always found himself very well where he was,
provided insects were not lacking. Happily, he had discovered in the
factory--and he studied as much as he could without magnifying glass
or spectacles--a small bee which forms its cells among the worm-holes
of the wood, and a "sphex" that lays its eggs in cells that are not
its own, as the cuckoo in the nests of other birds. Mosquitoes were
not lacking either, on the banks of the rivulets, and they tattooed
him with bites to the extent of making him unrecognizable. And when
Mrs. Weldon reproached him with letting himself be thus devoured by
those venomous insects: "It is their instinct, Cousin Weldon," he
replied to her, scratching himself till the blood came; "it is their
instinct, and we must not have a grudge against them!"
At last, one day--it was the 17th of June--Cousin Benedict was on the
point of being the happiest of entomologists.
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