“And you are not making fun of me?” asked the Caterpillar.
“Of course not,” answered the Lark.
“But you tell me such impossible things!”
“If you could fly with me and see the wonders that I see, here on earth, and away up in the blue sky, you would not say that anything was impossible,” replied the Lark.
“But,” said the Caterpillar, “you tell me that these eggs will hatch out into caterpillars, and I know that their mother was a butterfly, for I saw her with my own eyes; and so of course they will be butterflies. How could they be anything else? I am sure I can reason that far, if I cannot fly.”
“Very well,” answered the Lark, “then I must leave you, though I have even more wonderful things that I could tell. But what comes to you from the heavens, you can only receive by faith, as I do. You cannot crawl around on your cabbage leaf and reason these things out.”
“Oh, I do believe what I am told,” repeated the Caterpillar—although she had just proved that it was not true—“at least,” she added, “everything that is reasonable to believe. Pray tell me what else you learned.”
“I learned,” said the Lark, impressively, “that you will be a butterfly, yourself, some day.”
“Now, indeed, you are making fun of me,” exclaimed the Caterpillar, ready to cry with vexation and disappointment. But just at that moment she felt something brush against her side, and, turning her head, she looked in amazement at the cabbage leaf, for there, just coming out of the butterfly eggs, were eight or ten little green caterpillars—and they were no more than out of the eggs before they began eating the juicy leaf.
Oh, how astonished and how ashamed the Caterpillar felt. What the Lark had said was true!