“Caterpillars!” The chorus arose to a
shriek. “Don’t they sting you?
Don’t they bite you?”
“No, they don’t!” replied Molly-Cotton.
“They don’t bite anything except leaves;
they are fine big fellows; their colouring is exquisite;
and they evolve these beautiful moths. I invite
all of you to visit us, and see for yourselves how
intensely interesting they are.”
There was a murmur of polite thanks from the girls,
but one man measured Molly-Cotton from the top curl
of her head to the tip of her slippers, and answered,
" I accept the invitation. When may I come?”
He came, and left as great a moth enthusiast as any
of us. This incident will be recognized as furnishing
the basis on which to build the ballroom scene in
“A Girl of the Limberlost*”, in which
Philip and Edith quarrel over the capture of a yellow
Emperor. But what of these students from the
great representative colleges of the United States,
to whom a jumbled string made from the names, of half
a dozen moths answered for one of the commonest of
all?
<<*April 1994 [limbr10x.xxx] 125 A Girl of the Limberlost,
by Gene Stratton-Porter>>
In that same country garden where my first Cecropia
was found, Deilephila Lineata was one of my earliest
recollections. This moth flew among the flowers
of especial sweetness all day long, just as did the
hummingbirds; and I was taught that it was a bird also—the
Lady Bird. The little tan and grey thing hovering
in air before the flowers was almost as large as the
humming-birds, sipping honey as they did, swift in
flight as they; and both my parents thought it a
bird.
They did not know the humming-birds were feasting
on small insects attracted by the sweets, quite as
often as on honey, for they never had examined closely.
They had been taught, as I was, that this other
constant visitor to the flowers was a bird. When
a child, a humming-bird nested in a honeysuckle climbing
over my mother’s bedroom window. My father
lifted me, with his handkerchief bound across my
nose, on the supposition that the bird was so delicate
it would desert its nest and eggs if they were breathed
upon, to see the tiny cup of lichens, with a brown
finish so fine it resembled the lining of a chestnut
burr, and two tiny eggs. I well remember he
told me that I now had seen the nest and eggs of the
smallest feathered creature except the Lady Bird,
and he never had found its cradle himself.
Every summer I discovered nests by the dozen, and
for several years a systematic search was made for
the home of a Lady Bird. One of the unfailing
methods of finding locations was to climb a large
Bartlett pear tree that stood beside the garden fence,
and from an overhanging bough watch where birds flew
with bugs and worms they collected. Lady Birds
were spied upon, but when they left our garden they
arose high in air, and went straight from sight toward
every direction. So locating their nests as those
of other birds were found, seemed impossible.
