"Want to hatch their caterpillars, and raise them until they transform into these moths," answered poor Molly-Cotton, who had been taught to fear so few living things that at the age of four she had carried a garter snake into the house for a playmate.
"Caterpillars!" The chorus arose to a shriek. "Don't they sting you?
Don't they bite you?"
"No, they don't!" replied Molly-Cotton. "They don't bite anything except leaves; they are fine big fellows; their colouring is exquisite; and they evolve these beautiful moths. I invite all of you to visit us, and see for yourselves how intensely interesting they are."
There was a murmur of polite thanks from the girls, but one man measured Molly-Cotton from the top curl of her head to the tip of her slippers, and answered, "I accept the invitation. When may I come?" He came, and left as great a moth enthusiast as any of us. This incident will be recognized as furnishing the basis on which to build the ballroom scene in "A Girl of the Limberlost", in which Philip and Edith quarrel over the capture of a yellow Emperor. But what of these students from the great representative colleges of the United States, to whom a jumbled string made from the names, of half a dozen moths answered for one of the commonest of all?
CHAPTER V The Lady Bird: Deilephila Lineata
In that same country garden where my first Cecropia was found, Deilephila Lineata was one of my earliest recollections. This moth flew among the flowers of especial sweetness all day long, just as did the hummingbirds; and I was taught that it was a bird also—the Lady Bird. The little tan and grey thing hovering in air before the flowers was almost as large as the humming-birds, sipping honey as they did, swift in flight as they; and both my parents thought it a bird.
They did not know the humming-birds were feasting on small insects attracted by the sweets, quite as often as on honey, for they never had examined closely. They had been taught, as I was, that this other constant visitor to the flowers was a bird. When a child, a humming-bird nested in a honeysuckle climbing over my mother's bedroom window. My father lifted me, with his handkerchief bound across my nose, on the supposition that the bird was so delicate it would desert its nest and eggs if they were breathed upon, to see the tiny cup of lichens, with a brown finish so fine it resembled the lining of a chestnut burr, and two tiny eggs. I well remember he told me that I now had seen the nest and eggs of the smallest feathered creature except the Lady Bird, and he never had found its cradle himself.
Every summer I discovered nests by the dozen, and for several years a systematic search was made for the home of a Lady Bird. One of the unfailing methods of finding locations was to climb a large Bartlett pear tree that stood beside the garden fence, and from an overhanging bough watch where birds flew with bugs and worms they collected. Lady Birds were spied upon, but when they left our garden they arose high in air, and went straight from sight toward every direction. So locating their nests as those of other birds were found, seemed impossible.
Then I tried going close the sweetest flowers, those oftenest visited, the petunias, yellow day lilies, and trumpet creepers, and sitting so immovably I was not noticeable while I made a study of the Lady Birds. My first discovery was that they had no tail. One poised near enough to make sure of that, and I hurried to my father with the startling news. He said it was nothing remarkable; birds frequently lost their tails. He explained how a bird in close quarters has power to relax its muscles, and let its tail go in order to save its body, when under the paw of a cat, or caught in a trap.
That was satisfactory, but I thought it must have been a spry cat to get even a paw on the Lady Bird, for frequently humming-birds could be seen perching, but never one of these. I watched the tail question sharply, and soon learned the cats had been after every Lady Bird that visited our garden, or any of our neighbours, for not one of them had a tail. When this information was carried my father, he became serious, but finally he said perhaps the tail was very short; those of humming-birds or wrens were, and apparently some water birds had no tail, or at least a very short one.