Pastoral Days; or, Memories of a New England Year

by W. Hamilton Gibson

I remember how I watched the disturbed motion of the arrow-heads out in the water, as the cautious turtles worked their way among them, and crawled out upon the stump close by.

Here they huddled together, a dozen or more, with heads erect, and turning from side to side as they surveyed the surrounding carpet of lily-pads, or listened to the bass-drum chorus of the great green bull-frogs among the pickerel-weed; and when I jumped and yelled at them, what a rolling, sprawling, splashing in the mud! It fairly makes me laugh to think of it. But there is hardly a leaf or wisp of grass in this old swamp lot but what brings back some old association or pleasant reminiscence.

For a week thus we idled, now on the mountain, now in the meadow, while I, with my sketch-book and collecting-box, either whiled away the hours with my pencil, or left the unfinished work to pursue the tantalizing butterfly, or search for unsuspecting caterpillars among the weeds and bushes.

On a sprig of black alder I found one—the same little fellow as of old, afflicted with the peculiarities of all his progenitors. We used to call him “Professor Wiggler,” owing to an hereditary nervous habit of wiggling his head from side to side when not otherwise employed. To this little humpbacked creature I am indebted for a great deal of past amusement. Distinctly I remember the whack-whack-whack on the inside of the old pasteboard box as the captive pets threatened to dash out their brains in their demonstrations at my approach. Professor Wiggler is really a most remarkable insect, as one might readily imagine from his scientific name, for in learned circles this individual is known as Mr. Gramatophora Trisignata. He has many strange eccentricities. At each moult of the skin he retains the shell of his former head on a long vertical filament. Two or three thus accumulate, and, as a consequence, in his maturer years he looks up to the head he wore when he was a youngster, and ponders on the flight of time and the hollowness of earthly things, or perhaps congratulates himself on the increased contents of his present shell. When fully grown, he stops eating, and goes into a new business. Selecting a suitable twig, he gnaws a cylindrical hole to its centre and follows the pith, now and then backing out of the tunnel, and dropping the excavated material in the form of little balls of sawdust. At length he emerges from the hollow, and again drawing himself in backward, spins a silken disk across the opening, and tints it with the color of the surrounding bark. Here he spends the winter, and comes out in a new spring suit in the following May. Only recently I had in my possession several of these twigs with their enclosed caterpillars, and in every one the color of the silken lid so closely matched the tint of the adjacent bark, although different in each, that several of my friends, even with the most careful scrutiny, failed to detect the deceptive spot. Whether the result of chance or of the instincts of the insect, I do not know; but certain it is that he paints with different colors under varying circumstances.

Insect-hunting had always been a passion with me. Large collections of moths and butterflies had many times accumulated under my hands, only to meet destruction through boyish inexperience; and even in childhood the love for the insect and the passion for the pencil strove hard for the ascendency, and were only reconciled by a combination which filled my sketch-book with studies of insect life.

There was one inhabitant of our fields which had always been to me a never-failing source of entertainment. There he is, the gilded tyrant. I see him now swinging to and fro on his glistening nest of silken threads, his golden yellow form glowing in bold relief against the dark recess in the brambles. My sketch is left in the grass, and I am soon seated in front of the gossamer maze. A festive grasshopper jumps up into my face, and makes a carom on the web. With a spasmodic snap of one hind leg he extricates it from its entanglement, and in another instant would fall from the meshes; but the agile spider is too quick for him. With a movement so swift as almost to elude the eye, he draws from his body a silver cloud of floss, and with his long hind legs throws it over his captive. The head and tail of the grasshopper are now further secured, after which the spider carefully straddles around the struggling insect, and bites off the other radiating webs in close proximity. The unlucky prey now hangs suspended across the opening. With business-like coolness his tormentor dangles himself from the edge of the torn web, and another cataract of glistening floss is thrown up and attached to the under side of the prisoner, after which he is turned round and round, as if on a spit. The stream of floss is carried from head to foot, and in less time than it takes to describe it the victim is wrapped in a silken winding-sheet, and soon meets his death from the poisoned fangs of his captor. Here is but one of the thousands of tragedies that are taking place every hour of the day in our fields. While deeply interested in the closing scenes of this one, I suddenly become aware of a shadow passing over the bushes. I turn my head, and meet the puzzled and pleasant gaze of Amos Shoopegg, as he stands there, hands in pockets, and milk-pail swinging from his wrist.