This is a very touching epistle, my hearers, and Tommy has my hearty sympathy. There must be such a place as he is looking for, though the Deacon says that in the course of a long life he has never happened upon the exact locality. According to the Little School-ma'am, too, it is not described in any of the geographies; but she says that, for the sake of all concerned, it is very desirable that the missing paradise of little drummer boys should be discovered;—to which the Deacon adds, "Perhaps that's why the grown folk wish to find the North Pole."
While we are upon this subject, here is a letter describing some tiny drummers that make almost as much noise as patriotic youngsters, and do quite as much mischief. To his credit, however, it must be said that this other small musician only makes his appearance as a drummer once in seventeen years. Is he bent on setting an example, I wonder? He is called
THE SEVENTEEN-YEAR LOCUST.
Dear Jack: The seventeen-year locust isn't a locust at all. This may seem a strange thing to say, but it is true, nevertheless. The locust looks very much like a grasshopper, while the seventeen-year cicada, which is the insect's proper name, looks a great deal more like a gigantic fly than anything else.
There is a cicada which comes every year, and is also wrongly called a locust. Anybody who has been in the country about harvest-time has heard the shrill noise made by this cicada and probably has come upon his cast-off shell sticking to a fence-rail or a tree-trunk.
The seventeen-year cicada is a cousin of the one-year chap; though, as he comes only once in every seventeen years, he is probably only a far-away cousin. Fancy spending the best part of your life prowling about in the darkness underground and then coming up into the sunlight with a gorgeous pair of wings, only to die in a short time!
That is what the seventeen-year cicada does. In the very first place, it is an egg which its mother deposits in a tiny hole in a twig. In a few weeks it makes its way out of the egg and drops to the ground, into which it burrows, and in which it remains for nearly seventeen years before it is prepared for life above ground.
When, at last, it is ready for the bright sunlight, it may be one foot from the surface or it may be ten feet deep in the ground. In either case it begins to dig upward until it finds its way out, when it climbs up the nearest tree and fastens itself by its sharp claws to a leaf or twig. There it waits until its back splits open, and behold! it immediately crawls out of itself, so to speak.
The new insect is a soft, dull fellow at first, but he grows as if he had been storing up energy for seventeen years for just that one purpose. Within an hour, two pairs of most beautiful wings have grown, and in a few hours more it has become hard and active.
