“You may be sure I thanked him heartily and gave him a sixpence besides, which I am afraid went to buy tobacco.  ‘Law, Doctor, don’t I know it?’ Josh used to reply when my father urged him to break off a habit that was making a shaky old man of him at sixty; ’don’t I know it’s a dretful bad habit; but then you see a body must have somethin’ to be a-chawin’ on.’

“But what was in the brown package?  That was the question I puzzled my brains over.  I had never seen a cocoon in the least like it before, and I had no book on entomology to help me.  With the point of a needle I carefully picked away the outer layer till I came to loose silken fibers that evidently were the covering of an inside case.  Whatever was there was snugly tucked away in a little inner chamber with the key inside, and I must wait with what patience I could command till he chose to open the door.

“I kept my precious cocoon all winter in a cold, dry place; but when warm spring weather came it lay in state on my work-table, in a box lined with cotton, where I could watch it all day long.  Nothing happened till one bright day in June I heard a faint scratching inside the brown case.  It grew louder and louder every moment.  Evidently my tenant was bestirring himself and, with intervals of rest, was scraping and tearing away his silken wrappings.  Presently an opening was made and out of this were poked two bushy legs with claws that held fast by the outside of his house, while the creature gradually pulled himself out.

“First a head with horns; then a part of the body and two more legs; then, with one tremendous effort, he was free!—­an odd beast of no particular color, looking exceedingly damp and disagreeable, with his fat chunky body and short legs, like an exaggerated bumble-bee, only not at all pretty.  He was shaky on his legs and half tumbled from his box to the window-sill, along which he walked trembling till he came to the tassel of the shade, just within his reach.  This he grabbed with all four claws, his wings hanging down.

“‘It’s nothing but a homely old brown bug!’ said my brother Charlie, whom I had called to see the sight.

“‘No,’ I said, “‘it isn’t a bug.  I’m sure I don’t know what it is,’

“I was ready to cry with disappointment and vexation, for I had expected great things from my brown chrysalis.

“The tassel was gently swaying with the weight of the clumsy creature, and in the warm sunshine which was gradually drying body and wings faint colors began to show—­a dull red, a dash of white, a wavy band of gray, with patches of soft brown that began to look downy like feathers.  Every moment these colors grew more distinct and took new shapes.  None of them were bright, but they were beautifully blended and the whole body was of the texture of the finest velvet.

“But the wings!  How can I describe to you how those thick, crumpled, unsightly appendages grew and grew, changing in color from a dingy black to a dark brown, with bands of gray and red? how the great white patches took distinct form, and some were dashed with red and bordered with black, and others eye-shaped with crescents of pale blue?  It must have taken an hour for all this to come about—­for the great wings to unfurl to their widest extent and the cecropia moth to show himself in all his beauty to our admiring gaze.