BROKEN SLUMBER 



IT is the season when the greater part of the out-of- 

 doors world is supposed to be asleep. We see, on the 

 face of things, little evidence of the multitudinous life 

 that distracted us with its immense variety in summer, 

 but it needs but little prying beneath the surface to 

 find it in considerable force, and in not very comatose 

 condition. A spadeful of earth turned up in the 

 garden is fairly certain to reveal one of the fat cater- 

 pillars that battened lately on fuchsia or geranium. 

 It is not tucked away for a very elaborate sleep just 

 coiled head to tail in a chance cavity of the soil, and 

 it wriggles just a little in its slumber when we turn it 

 out. A sharp frost or two will do us some service 

 among these faintly sleeping devastators and mothers 

 of devastators. We are fortunate among all the in- 

 habitants of the forty-third parallel in these mild 

 winters that encourage only a half-hearted hiberna- 

 tion, which becomes the sleep of rotten death when a 

 sudden abnormal chill breaks in. 



A little farther away, upon the moors, you will not 

 find creatures taking their winter so frivolously. There, 

 even the caterpillars that intend to take another bite 

 in the spring before changing, take the trouble to wind 

 themselves up for the winter in a waterproof and prac- 

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