: The hero dies before the hero on Christmas day, a boy collecting butterflies. After the funeral, in the village, in a heated room, a huge Indian butterfly hatches from a cocoon that was in the boy’s collection.

At Sleptsov, in a Petersburg house, a son died, a boy who was fond of collecting butterflies. Father moved the “heavy, as if filled with all his life” coffin to the village, in a small white stone crypt near the village church and settled in the adjacent outbuilding of the estate, which was easy to heat.

The next morning, Sleptsov in high boots, in a short fur coat, quietly walked along a straight cleared path into the park, wondering that he was still alive and could feel. On the bridge he was seized with bitter anger - he remembered how in the summer his son walked on these slippery boards, catching a net of butterflies sitting on the railing. Most recently, in St. Petersburg, he was talking deliriously about a school, about some Indian butterfly.

Sleptsov stood for a long time, leaning against a pine tree, and looked at the church cross, blindly shining above the roofs of the village. After lunch, he went to the church, sat for about an hour at the crypt fence and returned home disappointed: it seemed to him that he was farther from his son on the graveyard than on the bridge in the estate.

After lunch, Sleptsov went to the church, spent about an hour at the grave fence and returned home.In the evening he ordered to unlock the big house, entered the room where his son lived in the summer. In the light of a lamp with a tin reflector, he sat down at the bare desk and sobbed. In the table he found notebooks, straighteners, a box of biscuits with a large cocoon, which his son remembered before his death. In the glass drawers of the cabinet lay flat rows of butterflies.

Now they have dried up for a long time - tailed swallowtail gleams gleam gently under the glass, sky-blue moths, red large butterflies in black dots, with a pearly underside.

In the outhouse, in the hotly flooded living room, the servant set up an arshinous Christmas tree on the table. Sleptsov ordered her to be removed and bent over his son’s belongings brought from home - a box with an Indian cocoon, a blue notebook. From the notebook, which turned out to be a diary, he learned that his son was in love with a neighbor's girl, but did not dare to meet her.

Sleptsov thought that tomorrow is Christmas, and today he will die, because he cannot live on.

For a moment it seemed to him that it was completely understood, earthly life was completely naked - woeful to horror, humiliatingly aimless, barren, devoid of miracles ...

At that moment, something clicked, and Sleptsov saw that a black creature the size of a mouse was crawling along the wall - a huge night butterfly slowly hatched from its cocoon. She hatched because a man exhausted from grief brought a cocoon to a warm room.

Soon, the shriveled creature turned into an Indian silkworm, which flies like a bird in the dusk around the lanterns of Bombay.Her dark velvet wings sighed and fluttered "in a fit of tender, delightful, almost human happiness."