AN ABANDONED DRAGON CASE
(Libellulid)
From this muddy outworn shell, left to decay at the bottom of a pool, there came, sometime last summer, a gorgeous, four-winged dragon-fly. A little after dawn, what was once this water nymph or mud dragon, tired perhaps of its mud existence, ready anyway for the transformation, crawled up out of the water upon some stone or stick and waited there for its back to split open up and down. It pulled its soft, boneless legs from their cases, now lying along the abandoned shell, its wings closely packed together from the two cases on its back and its head and jaws from out the broken head shell. Even every air passage running through its body shed its parchment lining.
Soft and helpless it crawled away into the grass to wait until its wet, soft outer skeleton should harden and make it possible for the powerful wing muscles to pull against it and for the broad wing films to dry and straighten out. By noon the transformation was doubtless quite complete, and flitting across the pond went the recent inhabitant of this dragon-fly case.
