<<*April 1994 [limbr10x.xxx] 125 A Girl of the Limberlost, by Gene Stratton-Porter>>

A queer little cocoon it was.  The body was tan colour, and thickly covered with a white sprinkling like lime.  A small thorn tree close the cabin yielded Raymond two more; but these were darker in colour, and each was spun inside three thorn leaves so firmly that it appeared triangular in shape.  The winds had blown the cocoons agianst the limbs and worn away the projecting edges of the leaves, but the midribs and veins showed plainly.  In all we had half a dozen of htese cocoons gathered from different parts of the swamp, and we found them dangling from a twig of willow or hawthorn, by a small piece of spinning.  During the winter these occupied the place of state in the conservatory, and were watched every day.  They were kept in the coolest spot, but where the sun reached them at times.  Always in watering the flowers, the hose was turned on them, because they would have been in the rain if they had been left out of doors, and conditions should be kept as natural as possible.

Close time for emergence I became very uneasy, because the conservatory was warm; so I moved them to my sleeping room, the coolest in the cabin, where a fireplace, two big windows and an outside door, always open, provide natural atmospheric conditions, and where I would be sure to see them every day.  I hung the twigs over a twine stretched from my dresser to the window-sill.  One day in May, when the trees were in full bloom, I was working on a tulip bed under an apple tree in the garden, when Molly-Cotton said to me, “How did you get that cocoon in your room wet?”

“I did not water any of the cocoons,” I answered.  “I have done no sprinkling today.  If they are wet, it has come from the inside.”

Molly-Cotton dropped her trowel.  “One of them was damp on the top before lunch,” she cried.  “I just now thought of it.  The moths are coming!” She started on a run and I followed, but stopped to wash my hands, so she reached them first, and her shout told the news.

“Hurry!” she cried.  “Hurry!  One is out, and another is just struggling through!” Quickly as I could I stood beside her.  One Polyphemus female, a giant indeed, was clinging to a twig with her feet, and from her shoulders depended her wings, wet, and wrinkled as they had been cramped in the pupa case.  Even then she had expanded in body until it seemed impossible that she had emerged from the opening of the vacant cocoon.  The second one had its front feet and head out, and was struggling frantically to free its shoulders.  A fresh wet spot on the top of another cocoon, where the moth had ejected the acid with which it is provided to soften the spinning, was heaving with the pushing head of the third.  Molly-Cotton was in sympathy with the imprisoned moths.

“Why don’t you get something sharp, and split the cocoons so they can get out?” she demanded.  “Just look at them struggle!  They will kill themselves!”