THE MOST BEAUTIFUL OF ALL
Lo! the bright train their radiant wings unfurl.
—_Anna L. Barbauld._
“It seems nothing but butterflies!” cried Ruth, running out into the
garden as soon as breakfast was over.
“Of course,” answered a voice, “the Lepidoptera will meet by the
summer-house.”
“Does that mean butterflies? And oh, please, may I come?”
“Yes, to both questions,” was wafted back from the beautiful creature
flitting so gracefully on the light warm breeze.
“Just like a flower with wings,” thought Ruth as, holding Belinda
closely, she followed as fast as she could go.
Indeed, they all seemed like flowers with wings, she decided, as she
came into the middle of the gathering.
“It is the most beautiful we have been to yet,” she whispered to
Belinda, “and I am sure it is going to be the most interesting. I
couldn’t begin to count them.”
Ruth might well say this, for nearly all the fifty-four families of
moths to be found in America north of Mexico were represented by at
least one member, while there were many from the four families of
butterflies and the two families of skippers.
Ruth came only just in time, for already one of the moths had begun to
speak. He was a handsome fellow, with fore wings in different shades of
olive.
“My friends,” he said, “I am called the modest sphinx, and, that being
the case, you may imagine how painful it is for me to put myself forward
in this way. I have been asked, however, to give you a few general
facts. Why I am expected to know these facts is, perhaps, because, being
a sphinx, I should also be wise. Yet I am not the only sphinx here, and,
if I remember aright, the old and historic sphinx _asked_, rather than
_answered_, questions.”
“He uses awfully big words,” Ruth whispered to her usual confidant,
Belinda.
“Now to begin,” went on the sphinx, “you know, I suppose, that we belong
to the order Lepidoptera, which means the scale wings, because the
colour of our wings is made by scales so tiny that they are really like
dust. We are divided into moths, butterflies, and skippers, and all of
us are messengers for the flowers, carrying the precious pollen from
blossom to blossom. Our children are generally enemies to the plants.
They are called caterpillars, and seem to have a great many legs, but
really only six of them are true legs and remain when the youngster is
full grown. The others are prolegs. There may be two or there may be
ten. They help in walking, but are shed with the last skin.”
“Alas!” sighed a voice in the corner. “I haven’t any to shed—that is, in
the middle of my body.”
Ruth turned as Mr. Looper, otherwise known as the measuring worm, made
this remark. She would have asked a question, for Mr. Looper, rearing
his head after his own queer fashion, seemed quite ready to talk, but
the sphinx stopped her.
“This is not the time to talk about individual legs,” he said. “We are
trying to get at general differences. Now there are certain ways in
which all moths differ from all butterflies.”
“I should say so,” said Miss Papilio, a handsome tiger swallowtail.
“Moths have short, stout bodies, and ours are slender.” And Miss Papilio
circled above them so that all might admire her delicate body and the
beauty of her tawny yellow wings, with their gray bands and stripes, and
their ends pointed in true swallowtail fashion.
“And here is another difference,” she added, coming to rest with her
wings folded together vertically. “We always carry our wings so when we
are not flying. You moths hold yours horizontally, or sloping. Never
upward.”
“Well, that’s true,” said the sphinx, “and you know we generally have
beautiful feathery antennæ, though I, and a few others, are an exception
to that rule, but you butterflies can boast only very thread-like
antennæ, with a knob at the end.”
“Enough about that subject,” spoke up Miss Papilio. “What I am wondering
about is why moths like to fly at night, or in the twilight. Now,
butterflies must have sunshine.”
“We love the cool, soft night, I can’t tell you why,” answered the
sphinx, “and we sleep through the noisy day.”
“But it is so dangerous to sleep as you do, when birds and other
nuisances are up and doing.”
“Well, birds are pests, there is no doubt about it, and if it hadn’t
been for them we insects would have possessed the earth long ago, but
you forget, we always choose a place that is nearly the colour of
ourselves, and we look so much like our surroundings that it would take
a sharp eye to find us. We are not brightly coloured, as a rule, like
the butterflies, or if we wear gay colours at all it is usually on our
hind wings, which we hide under the fore wings. Now the general remarks
being made, the audience may view the exhibits and hear their individual
histories.”
Ruth was up in a second.
“I must talk to that funny measuring worm,” she said to herself. “Why,
where is he?” she added, standing before the bush on which she had seen
him a while before.
“Right here,” answered what Ruth thought was a twig, and which proved to
be none other than Mr. Looper himself, who raised his head and began to
walk on his hind legs in his own eccentric fashion. Indeed, not only he,
but a number of other Mr. Loopers, all showing themselves in different
positions.
[Illustration: “‘SMART CHILDREN, AREN’T THEY?’ ASKED SOME MOTHS”]
“Smart children, aren’t they?” asked some moths, variously coloured in
black and brown and yellow, hovering above the tree where the loopers
were feeding. “They are ours—that is, not exactly ours, but ours will be
like them when they are hatched. These fellows will soon make little
cradles of leaves and go into the ground to go to sleep, and when they
come out they will be like us. Wonderful, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” agreed Ruth, “but I’d like to know about their legs.”
“I can explain that,” said Mr. Looper quickly. “I have no legs in the
middle of my body, and as that part of me isn’t supported, I can’t walk
like other caterpillars, for I _am_ a caterpillar, even if they _do_
call me a worm.”
“The legs, or the want of them, is a fault of his ancestors no doubt,”
interrupted a voice. “Probably they walked in his idiotic fashion for
fun, or to be different, even when they did have the right number of
legs, and so lost the use of them, and the legs, too, finally. That
often happens. I could tell you of cases——”
“Why, you look something like Miss Papilio,” said Ruth, turning to the
last speaker, and interrupting her reminiscences.
“I am a Miss Papilio,” was the answer, “but not the one you heard a
while ago. She was a tiger swallowtail, while I am a black swallowtail,
different, but quite as handsome in my way. We swallowtails all believe
in dressing well. We are butterflies, not moths, but though I am so
beautiful, I serve some very humble plants. I carry the precious pollen
for them. My children, I’m afraid, will not be so helpful, but what can
one do? I happen to like honey, but they prefer the leaves of parsley,
carrot, celery, and such things. They have large appetites, too.”
“Everything seems to have an appetite,” said Ruth.
“Well, my children will be able to eat, I can tell you. See, I have laid
my eggs on this bed of parsley. Ah! there’s a larva now. Not mine, but
mine will be like it. See, he is green, ringed with black and yellow. If
you tease him he will stick out his yellow horns at you, and you won’t
like the odour either. Would you believe I was once like that, and I
slept in a pupa case like the one under the twig there? You know there
always comes a time in the life of every caterpillar, if he lives long
enough of course, when he stops eating for good and wants nothing so
much as to sleep. That came to me, and I crawled from the parsley bed to
an old rail fence and began to spin. The silk was in my body, and it
came through two tubes in my lower lip.”
“That isn’t the way spiders spin,” said Ruth. “They——”
“I was not a spider,” said Miss Papilio. “I was a caterpillar, and they
always spin with their mouths. So that is what I did, and before long I
had lashed myself securely to the fence by strong silken loops. Then I
shed my pretty suit, and my skin shrivelled until it was a hard case. In
that safe cradle I went to sleep, and came out in the Spring with six
legs instead of sixteen, a slender tongue in place of sharp, hungry
jaws, and, best of all, four beautiful wings. Oh, the joy of sailing
through wonderful space, and sipping nectar from the sweetest flowers!”
“We have all felt that way,” said a large red-brown butterfly, whose
wings, lighter below, were veined and bordered by black, with a double
row of white spots on the edges. “Look at the chrysalis from which I
came, and say no more. Can you guess my name?”
Ruth was obliged to confess that she could not.
“I have often seen you though,” she added, “or butterflies just like
you.”
“Probably you have. I am called the monarch, and, frail as I look, I can
fly hundreds of miles without resting. I was just laying some eggs on
this milkweed, and since you are here, you might use your eyes a little.
You may see something worth while.”
Ruth was using her eyes as best she could, and soon she spied a number
of caterpillars chewing away upon the milkweed leaves. They were lemon
or greenish-yellow, banded with black.
“Will they grow into butterflies like you?” she asked.
“Yes,” was the answer, “but there is something more to see.”
Again Ruth looked, and now saw what appeared to be a little green jewel
dotted with golden nails.
“Oh!” she cried, “how lovely!”
“I thought you would say that,” and the monarch fluttered her wings
proudly. “That is our chrysalis, the cradle in which we sleep for our
great transformation. That is one thing the viceroy can’t do, though she
mimics us as much as possible.”
“Mimics you?” repeated Ruth, in surprise.
“Yes, certainly. You see we monarchs are wrapped in a magic perfume—that
no birds like, and so they never try to eat us. Now, Mrs. Viceroy hasn’t
this perfume, and to protect herself she tries to imitate our family
colours, so that the birds, mistaking her for one of us, may leave her
alone too. She even flies as we do. See her over there? She is smaller
than I am, but quite like me, except for the black line on her hind
wings. A careless observer would scarcely notice that, however.”
The monarch floated off to lay some more eggs, and Ruth found herself in
the midst of ever so many tawny brown butterflies, all bordered and
checkered with black, and having wings covered with silver spots.
“Oh, you are so lovely!” she cried, with shining eyes, and then, as they
passed on, calling back their name, “Fritillaries!” “Fritillaries!” she
turned to see many other dazzling creatures fluttering about her. Some
she had never seen before, but others were like old friends. There were
the meadow browns, the stout-bodied coppers, the slender, beautiful
blues, and more white cabbage butterflies than she could count. The
handsome red admiral flirted with the pretty painted lady, and the
mourning cloaks, with their purple-brown wings, yellow-bordered and
marked with light blue spots, were flitting about, telling everybody how
they had slept all Winter as butterflies, which is most uncommon in the
butterfly world, and were for that reason the first to show themselves
in the Spring.
“I used to wonder why you were out so early,” said Ruth, “and once I
found one of you in a crevice on a Winter day, and I couldn’t understand
about it.”
“Well, you do now. We hibernate like many animals.”
“But you must have been eggs in the beginning,” said Ruth. “The oil
beetle told me that all insects begin as eggs. And will you please tell
me how a butterfly knows the right kind of plant to lay her eggs on? It
always seems to be just the one her caterpillars like to eat. She
doesn’t eat it herself.”
“Of course not,” answered one of the mourning cloaks. “You need but look
at out tongues to see that we eat only honey. I can’t answer your
question, for none of us knows. Something tells us the proper plant for
our eggs. We lay them there without hesitation, and we lay a great many.
This is necessary, for one never knows what may happen. Most of them may
make a meal for something before they even hatch into caterpillars, and
if some miss this fate, and do hatch, there are any number of birds, and
their enemies, who like nothing so well as a fat, juicy caterpillar for
dinner. Then if that danger is escaped, there are the birds again, and
other hungry things, all anxious to get a taste of the butterfly. So you
can understand that in a life so full of accidents it is important to
have many eggs to begin with.”
“Yes,” said Ruth, “but——”
She didn’t finish, for just then she put her hand on what she thought
was a leaf, and, much to her surprise, she found that it was alive.
[Illustration]