UNDER THE MAPLES 



the dry leaves beside me. It humps around it in 

 an aimless sort of way, stopping now and then and 

 rearing up on its hind legs and feeling the vacant 

 space around it as a blind man might hunt for a 

 lost trail. I know what it wants: it is on its 

 travels looking for a place in which to go through 

 that wonderful transformation of creeping worm 

 into a winged creature. In its higher stage of 

 being it is a little silvery moth, barely an inch 

 across, and, like other moths, has a brief season of 

 life and love, the female depositing its eggs in some 

 suitable place and then dying or falUng a victim 

 to the wood pewee or some other bird. After some 

 minutes of groping and humping about on my hat 

 and on dry twigs and leaves, it is lost to my sight. 



A httle later a large black worm comes along. 

 It is an inch and a quarter long, and is engaged in 

 the same quest as its lesser brother of the green, 

 transparent coat. Magnify it enough times, say, 

 many thousand times, and what a terrible-looking 

 monster we should have — a traveling arch of 

 contracting and stretching muscular tissue, higher 

 than your head, and measuring off the ground a rod 

 or more at a time, or standing twenty feet or more 

 high, like some dragon of the prime. But now it is 

 a puny insect of which the caroling vireo overhead 

 would quickly dispose. 



With a twig I lift it to a maple sapling close by 

 and watch it go looping up the trunk. Evidently it 



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