At past six weeks of age they were exactly as Mr. Eisen had described them to me.  Those I kept in confinement pupated on a bed of baked gravel, in a tin bucket.  It is imperative to bake any earth or sand used for them to kill pests invisible to the eye, that might bore into the pupa cases and destroy the moths.

I watched the transformation with intense interest.  After the caterpillars had finished eating they travelled in search of a place to burrow for a day or two.  Then they gave up, and lay quietly on the sand.  The colour darkened hourly, the feet and claspers seemed to draw inside, and one morning on going to look there were some greenish brown pupae.  They shone as if freshly varnished, as indeed they were, for the substance provided to facilitate the emergence of the pupae from the caterpillar skins dries in a coating, that helps to harden the cases and protect them.  These pupae had burst the skins at the thorax, and escaped by working the abdomen until they lay an inch or so from the skins.

What a “cast off garment” those skins were!  Only the frailest outside covering, complete in all parts, and rapidly turning to a dirty brown.  The pupae were laid away in a large box having a glass lid.  It was filled with baked sand, covered with sphagnum moss, slightly dampened occasionally, and placed where it was cool, but never at actual freezing point.  The following spring after the delight of seeing them emerge, they were released, for I secured a male to complete my collection a few days later, and only grew the caterpillars to prove it possible.

There was a carnival in the village, and, for three nights the streets were illuminated brightly from end to end, to the height of Ferris wheels and diving towers.  The lights must have shone against the sky for miles around, for they drew from the Limberlost, from the Canoper, from Rainbow Bottom, and the Valley of the Wood Robin, their winged creatures of night.

I know Emperors appear in these places in my locality, for the caterpillars feed on leaves found there, and enter the ground to pupate; so of course the moth of June begins its life in the same location.  Mr. Pettis found the mated pair he brought to me, on a bush at the edge of a swamp.  They also emerge in cities under any tree on which their caterpillars feed.  Once late in May, in the corner of a lichen-covered, old snake fence beside the Wabash on the Shimp farm, I made a series of studies of the home life of a pair of ground sparrows.  They had chosen for a location a slight depression covered with a rank growth of meadow grass.  Overhead wild plum and thorn in full bloom lay white-sheeted against the blue sky; red bud spread its purple haze, and at a curve, the breast of the river gleamed white as ever woman’s; while underfoot the grass was obscured with masses of wild flowers.

An unusually fine cluster of white violets attracted me as I worked around the birds, so on packing at the close of the day I lifted the plant to carry home for my wild flower bed.  Below a few inches of rotting leaves and black mould I found a lively pupa of the Yellow Emperor.