122 DAN BEARD'S ANIMAL BOOK 



A LARGE KATYDID 



which I caught in the back yard late in the fall, 

 I gave it the freedom of my library and it became 

 very tame, would feed from my hand and lived 

 through the winter until after the Christmas holi- 

 days; then it met an untimely death by creeping 

 into the open fireplace to keep warm and being 

 scorched to death in the morning when the fire 

 was lighted. 



A friend of mine used to amuse himself by keep- 

 ing captive basket caterpillars on the desk where 

 he worked. 



THE BASKET CATERPILLAR 



had been fastened by a short thread, one end being 

 attached to the cone of the basket and the other 

 end to a pin which was driven in the desk in the 

 yard master's office of the O. & M. R. R. This 

 allowed the prisoner to creep only the length of 

 the string and the poor thing traveled for hours 

 around and around the circle described by the 

 radius of the thread. 



After a time my informant noticed that the 

 caterpillar had ceased its monotonous crawling and 

 had retired to the seclusion of its basket home. 

 While he was examining it, the caterpillar's head 

 suddenly peered through a hole which it had made 

 in the top of the basket. Finding the thread, it 

 bit it apart and freed itself. With its own silk it 

 carefully mended the hole in the apex of the cone, 

 and, after again turning a somersault inside of 



