These moths have more complete internal development
than those of night, for they feed and live throughout
the summer. I photographed a free one feasting
on the sweets of petunias in a flower bed at the
Cabin, on the seventh of October.
One morning there was a tap at my door, and when I
opened it I found a tall, slender woman having big,
soft brown eyes, and a winning smile. In one
hand she held a shoe-box, having many rough perforations.
I always have been glad that my eyes softened at
the touch of pleading on her face, and a smile sprang
in answer to hers before I saw what she carried.
For confession must be made that a perforated box
is a passport to my good graces any day.
The most wonderful things come from those that are
brought to my front door. Sometimes they contain
a belated hummingbird, chilled with the first heavy
frost of autumn, or a wounded weasel caught in a trap
set for it near a chicken coop, or a family of baby
birds whose parents some vandal has killed. Again
they carry a sick or wounded bird that I am expected
to doctor; and butterflies, moths, insects, and caterpillars
of every description.
“I guess I won’t stop,” said the
woman in answer to my invitation to enter the Cabin.
“I found this creature on my front porch early
this morning, and I sort of wanted to know what it
was, for one thing, and I thought you might like to
have it, for another.”
“Then of course you will come in, and we will
see what it is,” I answered, leading the way
into the library.
There I lifted the lid slightly to take a peep, and
then with a cry of joy, opened it wide. That
particular shoe-box had brought me an Actias Luna,
newly emerged, and as yet unable to fly. I held
down my finger, it climbed on, and was lifted to
the light.
“Ain’t it the prettiest thing?”
asked the woman, with stars sparkling in her dark
eyes. “Did you ever see whiter white?”
Together we studied that moth. Clinging to my
finger, the living creature was of such delicate beauty
as to impoverish my stock of adjectives at the beginning.
Its big, pursy body was covered with long, furry
scales of the purest white imaginable. The wings
were of an exquisite light green colour; the front
pair having a heavy costa of light purple that reached
across the back of the head: the back pair
ended in long artistic `trailers,’ faintly edged
with light yellow. The front wing had an oval
transparent mark close the costa, attached to it
with a purple line, and the back had circles of the
same. These decorations were bordered with lines
of white, black, and red. At the bases of the
wings were long, snowy silken hairs; the legs were
purple, and the antennae resembled small, tan-coloured
ferns. That is the best I can do at description.
A living moth must be seen to form a realizing sense
of its shape and delicacy of colour. Luna is
our only large moth having trailers, and these are
much longer in proportion to size and of more graceful
curves than our trailed butterflies.
