LIFE IN DEATH. 37 



and soon their songs of life and liberty, their morning hymn 

 and their evening boom, will be resounding over the bursting 

 hedgerows and the opening flowers. The Bee is still mute ; 

 the Beetle still motionless; the Butterfly (like the bud) 

 still enfolded in its protecting shroud : but they are not the 

 less existent, and to discover where and how, is a curious 

 object of pursuit, and eke a cheerful one, showing how 

 life and pleasure, activity and beauty, lie lurking under a 

 thousand dry and death-like forms, to which they owe their 

 preservation. 



Our first preserve, and, as already noticed, one of the lest, 

 is our garden, albeit but a very little one. Let us look around, 

 and here on this hedge we discern a something rarely enough 

 seen, although exposed to our view almost every where on every 

 winter's day. Amidst the intricate branches of the bare haw- 

 thorn, stretches forth an arm, distinguished from the rest by a 

 circlet of beads, a many-rowed bead bracelet, as regularly 

 wrought as bracelet ever worn on lady's wrist, or woven of silk 

 and beads by lady's fingers. This piece of natural jewellery is 

 the work of a certain Mother Moth, whose own eggs, set in an 

 indissoluble weather-proof cement, are the living gems of which 

 it is composed. The deceased manufacturer of this ornament, 

 was a female " Lackey," member of a tribe so called on ac- 

 count of the gaudy liveries (blue and red, white and yellow) 

 in which, while caterpillars, they are arrayed. From these 

 bracelet-eggs will come forth with the opening leaves, just in 

 lime to devour them, a new troop of these Lackey varlets, which 

 in due season (about June) will doff their coats of many colours, 

 for the sober chrysalidan-brown, and in July emerge from their 

 Aurelian shrouds and cases, a company of sober-suited light- 

 brown Moths, images of her, their lady mother, the constructor 

 of this bracelet. That we may look into its workmanship a 

 little closer, let us cut it from the hedge, with the branch it 

 compasses, and from which we can slip it like a ring. We find 

 on inspection, that each of the beads or eggs comprising it ; 



