the late September noons
It was of a pale yellow color , almost merging into light green , the yellow of a very ordinary butterfly , but its front wings were a shaded and exquisite pink , similar to the delicate rosy tints sometimes seen at daybreak . They had captured it , they said , in the late-ripening autumn grain fields of Bories , -- they had caught hold of it so deftly and carefully that their fingers had made no impression upon its brilliant coloring . When , at about noontime , I received it from them I was in the vestibule of my uncle 's house , a place always kept tightly closed during the hours of intense heat . From the wing of the house I heard my cousin singing in the thin and plaintive falsetto of a mountaineer ; he often sang in that manner , and when he did so his voice always gave me a feeling of unusual melancholy as it broke the stillness of the late September noons . He sang over and over the same old refrain : `` Ah ! Ah ! The good , good story ... '' Here he always broke off and recommenced .