Once upon a time a grasshopper introduced me to Mr. Periodical Cicada. He was a very pleasant fellow and not a bit stuck up, although the poets have written of him, and almost every one knows him by the name of seventeen year locust, though he really is not a locust at all. I was pleased to meet him, and asked him if he would mind telling me what he did all those seventeen years, and he replied:
“Not at all, now that they are over it is very pleasant to talk about them.” Then he began his story. “Seventeen years ago this June, in an old orchard, my mother tucked away in the green twigs of a mossy apple tree hundreds of little cradles. I was sleeping in one and in the others were my brothers and sisters. While my mother was at work our father sat on a twig close by and sang the merriest lullaby that babies ever listened to.
“Several weeks later we little ones crept out of our cradles and dropped lightly to the ground beneath the tree; then each of us dug a little burrow and hid ourselves away in the warm, moist soil near sappy rootlets that gave us our food.
“We were very tiny at first, but little by little we grew, always making our cells bigger to fit, so that we were as snug and cosy as babies could be, only it was very dark and lonely.
“The rootlets would tell us when it was spring, of how the pink and white blossoms were holding up perfumed cups to the blue sky; of the tree musical with the humming of the bees that came for honey; then of summer, when birds nested and sang among the green boughs; later of autumn, of apples mellow and ripe, globes of red and gold, that fell with a muffled thud in the long, green grass; and at last of the winter, and of the fleecy snow that clothed the old tree in soft white. They whispered of heat, of cold, of sunshine and rain, of freezing winds and balmy breezes, but we baby Cicadas neither understood nor cared, and there tucked away in our gloomy cells we lived seventeen long years.
“But one May day, in the sweetest of apple blossoming time, all we little Cicadas made up our minds to go out into the world and seek our fortunes. Then every one of us began digging and carrying up to the surface tiny pellets of soft clay.
“My, but we did work hard, and by the time the big sun had hidden his round face in the west each of us had built a funny little chimney six inches high.”
“Oh, how lovely!” I cried; “and please, Mr. Periodical Cicada, what were they for?”
But the Cicada only shook his head at me gravely, as much as to say that it was a Cicada family secret.
“When the chimneys were done,” he went on, “we all scrambled up and began hunting a safe place to rest. I soon found a fine twig where I held on for dear life. I wasn’t very pretty, being dressed in a brown coat, and besides, I had gotten very muddy building my chimney. Now while I was hanging there hoping to dry off—click—and goodness me! if my little brown jacket hadn’t split down my back from collar to waistband. I felt very bad, for even if it was a muddy, ugly brown coat, it was all I had, and I had no idea where to get another in the big, cold world I had just come into. But when I stepped out of my coat to see if I could mend it, my stockings and shoes came off with it and there I hung, if you will believe me, dressed in the prettiest cream-coloured suit you ever saw. I never was more surprised in my life.