Foes of Clothes and Carpets. 129 



young of the Cecropia moth. They are big things and 

 have to eat four or five times their weight daily, so that 

 when they mature they may attain the breadth of a hand- 

 span from tip to tip of their outspread wings. They 

 have need to hurry, for their lives are only t\vo weeks 

 from egg to egg, but the clothes-moth's grub may take 

 her time. She has a year before her; she is scarcely the 

 thickness of the lead of a lead-pencil, and her food is not 

 succulent green stuff, but as substantial and condensed as 

 hardtack. Still she manages to devour quite as much as 

 is satisfactory. 



There comes a time when she must leave her happy 

 home in the box of winter things and go out into the 

 great, wide world. \Ylien she can, she forsakes the old 

 place, but never her modest, maidenly ways. She takes 

 her frock with her, sometimes even climbing a fifteen- 

 foot wall to attach herself to a quiet nook of the cornice. 

 There she falls into a stupor that gives another proof of 

 our descent from clothes-moths. It is the period of her 

 life that corresponds to the awkward age in those that 

 were children yesterday and will be young ladies and 

 gentlemen next \veek. Their senses leave them only 

 enough to make them unreasonable and hard to get 

 along with, but our ancestral relations, the Tineids, 

 manage it better. Their hobble-de-hoys, boys and girls, 

 go sound asleep for three weeks, and then wake up, full- 

 gro'wn and with all the sense they ever will have. In 

 such a long nap one must turn over from time to time, 

 and every movement wriggles the chrysalis in the larval 

 case, so that, when the time comes, it is no trick at all for 

 the young mouth to creep forth, shake the wrinkles out 

 of her pretty pale wings, and go in search of an eligible 

 parti, just as her mother did before her. 



A cousin of hers, Tincola bisclliclla, the webbing clothes- 



