What an appetite he had! Nothing came amiss to him. He had no teeth, but his strong jaws could do quite enough damage to the plants in the garden.
"What a greedy fellow you are!" said a woolly brown caterpillar one day. "I have a good appetite, I know, but your life is one long meal."
"Let him alone," said a passing bee. "Let him eat all he can. The time will come when he will live quite without food."
Both caterpillars stared. "Whatever do you mean?" asked Tail-up.
"Wait and see," said the Bee.
"I believe you are talking nonsense," said Tail-up. He hurried away to find another meal.
He was never at a loss for food, for when he had devoured all the choicest bits off one tree, he dropped to the ground by a silk rope and made his way to a fresh one.
This silk rope was another of his oddities. He kept whole coils of it in his body. When he wanted to reach the ground he brought the end of one of the coils out of his mouth and gummed it on to the branch where he sat. He then slid off the branch, hanging by the rope. Slowly and carefully he came down, letting out more rope as he needed it, until he reached the ground. There he broke the rope and hurried away to climb the next tree.
After a day or two he thought: "I will make a house. It shall be just like mother's, smooth and cosy inside, but so strong that nothing can break its way in."
He set to work to weave a basket-house, doing a little each day between his many meals. He drew the silk thread out of his own body, and wove the house round and round his upreared tail. "It would be tiresome to have to go back to it each night," he said, so he carried it with him. He looked more comical than ever now, going about with his partly-built house on his tail.