Miss Elliot's Girls Part 4

"'Keep a watch on him this afternoon,' said Tim,' and you'll see something queer,'

"So we did; and Aunt Susan was summoned to the porch by the news that 'the worm had split in the back and was coming out of his skin.' By the time she had got on her gla.s.ses and was ready to witness this wonderful sight, it was over. A heap of dried skin lay in the bottom of the box, and a pretty chrysalis of a delicate green color hung in place of the worm.

"'O Auntie!' said Charlie, 'you ought to have seen him twist and squirm and make the split in his back bigger and bigger till it burst open and tumbled off, just as a boy wriggles out of a tight coat, you know!'

"After this came three weeks of waiting, during which the green chrysalis turned gray and hard and the other worms, one by one, went through the same changes, until four gray chrysalis were fastened to the sides of the box.

"Every day I looked, but nothing happened, until it seemed to me, tired of waiting, that nothing ever _would_ happen. But one bright morning I forgot all my weariness when I found, clinging to the netting, a beautiful creature like the one we saw on the honeysuckle this afternoon, with a slender black body and wings spotted with yellow and scarlet and lovely blue. When I opened the box he didn't try to fly. He was weak and trembling, and his wings were damp, but every moment they grew larger and his colors brighter in the suns.h.i.+ne.

"While Charlie and I stood watching him, we discussed, in our own way, a problem that has puzzled wiser heads than ours--how three distinct individuals (the worm, the chrysalis, and the b.u.t.terfly) could be one and the same creature, and how from a low-born worm that groveled and crawled could be born this bright ethereal being--all light and beauty and color--that seemed fitted only for the sky.

"Aunt Susan listened to our talk a while and then repeated a text of Scripture:--

"'Who shall change our vile body, that it may be fas.h.i.+oned like unto his glorious body?'"

"While we talked the b.u.t.terfly grew stronger and more beautiful, until at last, spreading his wings to their widest extent, he darted high into the air and we lost him. But from the day I took the green worm from the fennel-bush in Aunt Susan's garden I date my introduction to a delightful study which I have followed all my life as I have found opportunity. So you see it is no wonder I am fond of the swallow-tailed b.u.t.terfly; and I have another reason, for once on a time I tamed one so that it sucked honey from my finger."

"Auntie, you are joking!"

"Indeed, no. It was a poor little waif which, mistaking chimney heat for warm spring weather, hatched himself out of season, and whose life I prolonged by providing him with food."

"The dear little thing! Tell us about it, please."

"Well, I had put away some chrysalids for the winter in a closet in my sleeping-room, and one day my nurse--I was ill at the time--heard a rustling in the box where they lay and brought it to me for investigation; and, behold! when I opened it there was a full-grown swallow-tail, who, waking too soon from his winter's nap, left the soft bed of cotton where his companions lay sleeping side by side and, wide awake and ready to fly, was impatiently waiting for some one to let him out into the suns.h.i.+ne.

"But the March suns.h.i.+ne was fitful and pale, and the cold wind would have chilled him to death before night; so we resolved to keep him indoors. We gave him the liberty of the room, and he fluttered about the plants in the window, now and then taking a flight to the ceiling, where, I am sorry to say, he bruised his delicate wings; but he seemed to learn wisdom by experience, for after a while he contented himself with a lower flight. Every day my bed was wheeled close to the window, and I amused myself for hours watching my pretty visitor. He would greedily suck a drop of honey, diluted with water, from the leaf of a plant or from the end of my finger, and by sight or smell, perhaps by both senses, soon learned where to go for his dinner.

"And so he lived and thrived for a fortnight, and I had hopes of keeping him till spring; but one cold night the furnace fire went out, and in the morning my pretty swallow-tail lay dead on the window-sill. Wasn't it a pity?

"Oh," said Florence, "I like to hear about b.u.t.terflies! Will you please tell us about some of the other kinds you have kept?"

"Tell us about that big fellow you said every body made a fuss over.

Ce-ce--I can't remember what you called him."

"Cecropia!" said Susie, promptly. "Yes, do, Auntie! if you are not tired."

If Ruth Elliot had been ever so weary I think she would have forgotten it at sight of the interested faces of her audience; but in fact she was not in the least tired, but was as pleased to tell as they were to listen to the story of

THE CECROPIA MOTH.

"One day in November," she said, "a man who used to do odd jobs about the place for my father, and whom we always called Josh,--his name was Joshua Wheeler,--left his work to bring to the house and put into my hand a queer-looking pod-shaped package firmly fastened to a stout twig.

It was of a rusty gray color and looked as much like a thick wad of dirty brown paper as any thing I can think of.

"'I found this 'ere cur'us lookin' thing,' he said, 'under a walnut-tree on the hill yonder, where I was rakin' up leaves--an', thinks I, there's some kind of a crittur stored away inside, an' Miss Ruth she's crazy arter bugs an' worms an' sich like varmints, an' mebbe she'd like to see what comes out o' this 'ere; so I've fetched it along.'

"You may be sure I thanked him heartily and gave him a sixpence besides, which I am afraid went to buy tobacco. 'Law, Doctor, don't I know it?'

Josh used to reply when my father urged him to break off a habit that was making a shaky old man of him at sixty; 'don't I know it's a dretful bad habit; but then you see a body must have somethin' to be a-chawin' on.'

"But what was in the brown package? That was the question I puzzled my brains over. I had never seen a coc.o.o.n in the least like it before, and I had no book on entomology to help me. With the point of a needle I carefully picked away the outer layer till I came to loose silken fibers that evidently were the covering of an inside case. Whatever was there was snugly tucked away in a little inner chamber with the key inside, and I must wait with what patience I could command till he chose to open the door.

"I kept my precious coc.o.o.n all winter in a cold, dry place; but when warm spring weather came it lay in state on my work-table, in a box lined with cotton, where I could watch it all day long. Nothing happened till one bright day in June I heard a faint scratching inside the brown case. It grew louder and louder every moment. Evidently my tenant was bestirring himself and, with intervals of rest, was sc.r.a.ping and tearing away his silken wrappings. Presently an opening was made and out of this were poked two bushy legs with claws that held fast by the outside of his house, while the creature gradually pulled himself out.

"First a head with horns; then a part of the body and two more legs; then, with one tremendous effort, he was free!--an odd beast of no particular color, looking exceedingly damp and disagreeable, with his fat chunky body and short legs, like an exaggerated b.u.mble-bee, only not at all pretty. He was shaky on his legs and half tumbled from his box to the window-sill, along which he walked trembling till he came to the ta.s.sel of the shade, just within his reach. This he grabbed with all four claws, his wings hanging down.

"'It's nothing but a homely old brown bug!' said my brother Charlie, whom I had called to see the sight.

"'No,' I said, "'it isn't a bug. I'm sure I don't know what it is,'

"I was ready to cry with disappointment and vexation, for I had expected great things from my brown chrysalis.

"The ta.s.sel was gently swaying with the weight of the clumsy creature, and in the warm suns.h.i.+ne which was gradually drying body and wings faint colors began to show--a dull red, a dash of white, a wavy band of gray, with patches of soft brown that began to look downy like feathers. Every moment these colors grew more distinct and took new shapes. None of them were bright, but they were beautifully blended and the whole body was of the texture of the finest velvet.

"But the wings! How can I describe to you how those thick, crumpled, unsightly appendages grew and grew, changing in color from a dingy black to a dark brown, with bands of gray and red? how the great white patches took distinct form, and some were dashed with red and bordered with black, and others eye-shaped with crescents of pale blue? It must have taken an hour for all this to come about--for the great wings to unfurl to their widest extent and the cecropia moth to show himself in all his beauty to our admiring gaze.

"The whole family had gathered to see the show. My father lingered, hat and riding-whip in hand, though he had a round of twenty miles to make among his patients before night; and Aunt Susan, who was on a visit, stood peering through her spectacles, too much absorbed to notice black Dinah taking a nap in her work-basket and the kitten making sad havoc with her knitting. Josh was called in from the wood-shed, and, with his hat on the back of his head and hands deep in his pockets, gazed in silence.

"'Wal,' he said at length, 'if that don't beat all natur'! Look at the size of that crittur, will you, and the hole he's jest crawled out of.

Why, he's as big as a full-grown bat, measures full seven inches across from wing to wing. Wal, now, I'd gin consider'ble to know what's be'n goin' on for a spell back in that leetle house where he's pa.s.sed his time; and I'll bet, Doctor, with all your larnin', _you_ can't tell.'"

CHAPTER V.

FURRY-PURRY BECOMING GOLD ELSIE.

Miss Ruth found on her table the next Wednesday afternoon a note very neatly and carefully written, which read as follows:--

Miss RUTH,--Will you Please tell us Another Cat Story, becaus I like them best. So does Fannie Eldridge she said So after You told Worm stories.

Miss Ruth I Have Named my Black Kitty After your Dinah Diamond, her Last Name has to Be Spot Becaus her Spot is not a Diamond, this is from your Friend.

NELLIE DIMOCK.

"I hold in my hand," Miss Ruth said, when she had carefully perused this epistle, "a written request from two members of our Society for another cat story. Susie and Mollie, have I any more cat stories worth telling?"

"Yes, indeed, Auntie" said Mollie. "Don't you remember the pretty fairy story you used to tell us about the good little girl who saved a cat from being drowned by some bad boys, and carried her home? and she turned out to be a fairy cat and gave that girl every thing she wished for--cakes and candy, and a lovely pink silk frock packed in a nutsh.e.l.l for her to wear to the party?"

"O Mollie! that's too much of a baby story," said Susie. "Tell us about the musical cat who played the piano by walking over the keys, and all the people in the house thought it was a ghost."

"Yes, Auntie; and the funny story of the cat and the parrot--how the parrot got stuck up to her knees in a pan of dough, and in her fright said over every thing she had learned to say: 'Polly wants a cracker!'

'Oh, my goodness' sakes alive!' 'Get out, I say!' 'Here's a row!' 'Scat, you beast!' and so on;--and how the cat got her out."

"These are old stories, girls, and you have told them for me."

"Our old cat Jane," said Eliza Ann Jones, "is a regular cheat. You see, she _would_ lie in grandma's chair. She used to jump in if grandma left it only for a minute; and grandma wouldn't know she was there, and two or three times sat right down on her. Why, it was just awful, and scared poor grandma half to death. Well, ma whipped the old cat every time she caught her in the chair, and we thought she was cured of the habit; but one day ma came into the room and there was n.o.body there but Jane, and she was stretched on the rug and seemed to be fast asleep; but grandma's chair was rocking away all by itself. Ma wondered what made the chair go, so she thought she'd watch. She left the door on a crack and peeped through, and as soon as the cat thought she was alone she jumped into the chair and settled herself for a nap; but when ma made a little noise, as if somebody were coming out, she hopped out and stretched herself on the rug and made believe she was fast asleep. 'Twas her jumping out so quick that set the chair rocking. Now, wasn't that cute?"