My heart goes out to Cecropia because it is such a noble, birdlike, big fellow, and since it has decided to be rare with me no longer, all that is necessary is to pick it up, either in caterpillar, cocoon, or moth, at any season of the year, in almost any location.  The Cecropia moth resembles the robin among birds; not alone because he is grey with red markings, but also he haunts the same localities.  The robin is the bird of the eaves, the back door, the yard and orchard.  Cecropia is the moth.  My doorstep is not the only one they grace; my friends have found them in like places.  Cecropia cocoons are attached to fences, chicken-coops, barns, houses, and all through the orchards of old country places, so that their emergence at bloom time adds to May and June one more beauty, and frequently I speak of them as the Robin Moth.

In connexion with Cecropia there came to me the most delightful experience of my life.  One perfect night during the middle of May, all the world white with tree bloom, touched to radiance with brilliant moonlight; intoxicating with countless blending perfumes, I placed a female Cecropia on the screen of my sleeping-room door and retired.  The lot on which the Cabin stands is sloping, so that, although the front foundations are low, my door is at least five feet above the ground, and opens on a circular porch, from which steps lead down between two apple trees, at that time sheeted in bloom.  Past midnight I was awakened by soft touches on the screen, faint pullings at the wire.  I went to the door and found the porch, orchard, and night-sky alive with Cecropias holding high carnival.  I had not supposed there were so many in all this world.  From every direction they came floating like birds down the moonbeams.  I carefully removed the female from the door to a window close beside, and stepped on the porch.  No doubt I was permeated with the odour of the moth.  As I advanced to the top step, that lay even with the middle branches of the apple trees, the exquisite big creatures came swarming around me.  I could feel them on my hair, my shoulders, and see them settling on my gown and outstretched hands.

Far as I could penetrate the night-sky more were coming.  They settled on the bloom-laden branches, on the porch pillars, on me indiscriminately.  I stepped inside the door with one on each hand and five clinging to my gown.  This experience, I am sure, suggested Mrs. Comstock’s moth hunting in the Limberlost.  Then I went back to the veranda and revelled with the moths until dawn drove them to shelter.  One magnificent specimen, birdlike above all the others, I followed across the orchard and yard to a grape arbour, where I picked him from the under side of a leaf after he had settled for the coming day.  Repeatedly I counted close to a hundred, and then they would so confuse me by flight I could not be sure I was not numbering the same one twice.  With eight males, some of them fine large moths, one superb, from which to choose, my female mated with an insistent, frowsy little scrub lacking two feet and having torn and ragged wings.  I needed no surer proof that she had very dim vision.