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.

CHAPTER VI Moths of the Moon:  Actias Luna

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.