148 EYE SPY 
face of an ordinary cocoon when you will. True, 
there are some cocoons into whose silk meshes 
the caterpillar weaves the hair of its body, but the 
felt thus formed is only a shell, and is intermeshed 
with silken webs, and one pinch alone will open 
up the hollow interior and show us the caterpillar 
or chrysalis within. Such, for instance, is the lit- 
tle brown winter snuggery of the woolly -bear 
caterpillar which we all know, and whose prickly 
cocoons may be found beneath stones and logs in 
the fields. 
But what do we find in these cocoons that we 
now have before us ? Not only is there no ves- 
tige of silk to be seen, but there are hairs enough 
in this single cocoon to have supplied a hun- 
dred caterpillars, while we look in vain for any 
sign of the spinner within. Indeed, there is no 
within ; pinch after pinch reveals nothing but the 
same gray felt. We are now a quarter of an 
inch below the surface, when another pinch brings 
with it a small mass of white specks like crumbs 
intermingled with the hair, and in the hollow thus 
deepened we observe a shiny white object like 
ivory, with a minute ball at its tip. It certainly 
looks like a tiny bone. We impatiently break 
open the cocoon, when we see in truth a bone 
indeed, a compact mass of bones from some very 
small animal, whose identity we may guess from 
the mouse-color of the felt. Here is the femur of 
