With that the poor Butterfly drooped her wings and died, and the Caterpillar had no chance to so much as say “Yes,” or “No.”
“Dear me!” she exclaimed, as she looked at the butterfly eggs beside her, “what sort of a nurse will I make for a group of gay young butterflies? Much attention they will pay to the advice of a plain caterpillar like me. But I shall have to do the best that I can,” she added. And all that night she walked around and around the butterfly eggs to see that no harm came to them.
“I wish that I had someone wiser than myself to consult with,” she said to herself next morning. “I might talk it over with the house dog. But, no,” she added hastily, “he is kind, but big and rough, and one brush of his tail would whisk all the eggs off the cabbage leaf.
“There is Tom Cat,” she went on, after thinking a few moments, “but he is lazy and selfish, and he would not give himself the trouble to think about butterfly eggs.
“Ah, but there’s the Lark!” she exclaimed at length. “He flies far up into the heavens and perhaps he knows more than we creatures that live upon the earth. I’ll ask him.”
So the Caterpillar sent a message to the Lark, who lived in a neighboring cornfield, and she told him all her troubles.
“And I want to know how I, a poor crawling Caterpillar, am to feed and care for a family of beautiful young butterflies. Could you find out for me the next time you fly away up into the blue heavens?”
“Perhaps I can,” said the Lark, and off he flew.
Higher and higher he winged his way until the poor, crawling Caterpillar could not even hear his song, to say nothing of seeing him.