122 Life and Immortality. 
purple have assumed a richer hue and blaze like a coronet 
of rubies. When at rest, with the rings all bunched and 
body shortened, the infantile Luna is as thick as a man’s 
thumb, measuring but two inches in linear direction; but 
when she sets out upon her travels, feeling the dignity of her 
station in life, she stretches to her full length of three 
inches. 
When have been completed her allotted days of feeding 
upon the leaves of the hickory, oak, walnut or sweet gum, 
and she is seriously contemplating the preparing of a shroud 
and casket in which to await her resurrection-morn, she casts 
about for leaves, which, when they are found, she securely 
draws together, and within the hollow space there is soon 
spun avery close and strong oval cocoon of silk, one and 
three-fourths inches in length, of chestnut-brown color, thin, 
and covered with warts and excrescences, but seldom showing 
the imprints of leaves. Cocoons of Luna so nearly resemble 
those of polyphemus, that many an experienced collector 
is greatly chagrined, after getting together a large supply 
of what he deems Luna cocoons, to find dusky, one-eyed 
polyphemi to issue from the silken tombs rather than a 
goodly throng, in delicate bridal attire, of proud empresses 
of the night. Polyphemus cocoons are, however, somewhat 
smaller than Lunas, white or dirty-white in color, rounded 
at each end, and sometimes angular, because of the leaves 
being unevenly moulded into their surfaces, and generally 
covered with a whitish meal-like powder. 
In June the Lunas awake from their death-like slumber, 
burst asunder their silken cerements, having at first made 
loose the compact threads by a fluid-ejection, and come out 
into the world in all the freshness and glory of a new and 
untried existence. Their wings, which expand from four and 
three-fourths to five and one-half inches, are of a delicate 
light-green color, the hinder ones being prolonged into a tail 
of an inch and a half or more in length. Along the anterior 
margin of the fore-wings is a broad purple-brown stripe, 
