The minutes passed.  Freckles’ steady gaze never wavered.  Without realizing it, he was trembling with eagerness and anxiety.  As he saw what was taking place, “It’s going to fly,” he breathed in hushed wonder.  The morning sun fell on the moth and dried its velvet down, while the warm air made it fluffy.  The rapidly growing wings began to show the most delicate green, with lavender fore-ribs, transparent, eye-shaped markings, edged with lines of red, tan, and black, and long, crisp trailers.

Freckles was whispering to himself for fear of disturbing the moth.  It began a systematic exercise of raising and lowering its exquisite wings to dry them and to establish circulation.  The boy realized that soon it would be able to spread them and sail away.  His long-coming soul sent up its first shivering cry.

“I don’t know what it is!  Oh, I wish I knew!  How I wish I knew!  It must be something grand!  It can’t be a butterfly!  It’s away too big.  Oh, I wish there was someone to tell me what it is!”

He climbed on the locust post, and balancing himself with the wire, held a finger in the line of the moth’s advance up the twig.  It unhesitatingly climbed on, so he stepped to the path, holding it to the light and examining it closely.  Then he held it in the shade and turned it, gloating over its markings and beautiful coloring.  When he held the moth to the limb, it climbed on, still waving those magnificent wings.

“My, but I’d like to be staying with you!” he said.  “But if I was to stand here all day you couldn’t grow any prettier than you are right now, and I wouldn’t grow smart enough to tell what you are.  I suppose there’s someone who knows.  Of course there is!  Mr. McLean said there were people who knew every leaf, bird, and flower in the Limberlost.  Oh Lord!  How I wish You’d be telling me just this one thing!”

The goldfinch had ventured back to the wire, for there was his mate, only a few inches above the man-creature’s head; and indeed, he simply must not be allowed to look up, so the brave little fellow rocked on the wire and piped, as he had done every day for a week:  “See me?  See me?”

“See you!  Of course I see you,” growled Freckles.  “I see you day after day, and what good is it doing me?  I might see you every morning for a year, and then not be able to be telling anyone about it.  ’Seen a bird with black silk wings—­little, and yellow as any canary.’  That’s as far as I’d get.  What you doing here, anyway?  Have you a mate?  What’s your name?  ‘See you?’ I reckon I see you; but I might as well be blind, for any good it’s doing me!”

Freckles impatiently struck the wire.  With a screech of fear, the goldfinch fled precipitately.  His mate arose from the nest with a whirr—­Freckles looked up and saw it.

“O—­ho!” he cried.  “So that’s what you are doing here!  You have a wife.  And so close my head I have been mighty near wearing a bird on my bonnet, and never knew it!”