The little box of broken, dusty butterflies

Robert Hugh Benson, The Coward, Hutchinson 1912, p. 307

Right up from the little box of broken, dusty butterflies which he had collected before he went to school at all, to the new rook-rifle he had bought last Christmas —all resembled the case of a caddis-worm, sticks and pebbles gathered in a day of  life. And now he was going to split the case and climb up through the dim and mysterious atmosphere to another state of existence.