"I see them!" she exclaimed, delighted. "Oh, what funny, scrubby, busy little creatures! They are everywhere—everywhere! Why, there seem to be thousands and thousands of them! And all are eating the tiny green bunches of fruit!"
They bent together over a group of feeding larvæ; he handed her a pocket microscope like his own; and, enchanted, she studied the tiny things while he briefly described their various stages of development from the little eggs to the pretty, pearl-tinted moth so charmingly striped with delicate, brown lines—a rare prize in the cabinet of any collector.[43]
V
Through the golden forest light of afternoon, they moved from shrub to shrub; and he taught her to be on the watch for any possible foes of the neat and busy little caterpillars, warning her to watch for birds, spiders, beetles, ichneumon flies, possibly squirrels or even hornets. She nodded her comprehension; he went one way, she the other. For nearly ten minutes they remained separated, and it seemed ages to one of them anyway.
But the caterpillars appeared to be immune. Nothing whatever interfered with them; wandering beetles left them unmolested; no birds even noticed them; no gauzy-winged and parasitic flies investigated them.
"Mr. Jones!" she called.[44]
He was at her side in an instant.
"I only wanted to know where you were," she said happily.