GOSSAMER AND SILK 147 



as they differ in classification the six-legged insects and the 

 eight-legged arachnids the general similarity of nature's 

 plan is very striking especially in this art of silk manufac- 

 ture. Both produce silk in tubes and a viscous fluid along 

 with it. In one stage of the silkworm's life the fluid and 

 the silk together form the very toughest and finest form of 

 catgut made. Both tease and card and distribute the silk 

 through * spinnerets ' set at the end of the tube. Possibly 

 the first use of the silk in all cases was for a cradle and a 

 home. The butterfly uses it still for no other purpose than 

 to protect over the critical weeks the transforming grub. 

 ' Behind the veil,' the silken veil, the mystery develops. 

 Forms that we think ugly in form, if not in colour, are 

 transmuted into forms which we think lovely. The beast 

 that is purely sensual, in the sense that its whole vocation 

 is voracity it eats and eats and eats unfolds into a fairy 

 thing that either eats nothing, living like Shelley's chameleon 

 on light and air, or sucking only the most delicate nectar 

 from rainbow flowers. That which crawled on the earth or 

 below it, sometimes, as in the cockchafer grub, so weighed 

 down by its own belly that it can do no more than heave 

 itself along from grass root to grass root, suffers an air- 

 change into a thing almost bodiless, with wings so wide in 

 their sweep that it must aspire upward as the other must fall 

 downward. They carry the new being in a wayward patrol 

 up to the tree-tops and over in a path as untraceable as the 

 downward chasse of a snowflake. The stored energy of 

 long months of material life is suddenly expressed in a 

 blaze of shapely glory, as when a flame bursts upward from 

 the barren pith cells of a log or the blackened inertness of a 

 carbon lump. 



' The flame of the soul burns upwards.' There is a com- 

 peting symbolism in this air-change, wrought quickly and most 



