IN FEATHERS AMD FUR. 167 
A CURIOUS LITTLE BUILDER. 
There's a funny little creature in a buff satin dress, who likes 
to live in our houses, though I must say she isn't very welcome, and 
we try our best to drive her off. 
Not but what she's pretty enough, but she has a most unlucky 
fancy for making her nursery in our furs and woolens. When we 
find bare places in our muffs, and tiny holes in our flannels and 
broadcloths, we have good reason to be very much vexed with 
Madam Tinea Pellionella (I wonder how she'd like that awful name, 
if she knew it.) 
You see this little mother is a bit of a fly, not 
more than a quarter of an inch long. We call her 
a Moth, and she glues her minute eggs to the hairs 
of furs or woolens that she finds hanging up in clos- 
ets, or packed in trunks, unless the trunk is per- 
fumed with camphor or tobacco — which she hates. After the 
eggs have been there two or three weeks, they burst open, and out 
comes the baby. It isn't a buff fly like its Mamma, but a tiny 
white worm, and it proceeds at once to build a house for itself. 
This is the way they go to work. The little builder reaches 
around till he finds a long hair — long to him, I mean — which he 
cuts off close to the cloth. This he lays lengthwise of his body, 
then gets another and lays it by its side, fastening them together 
by silk threads, which he spins as he works. Thus he goes on, 
cutting, spinning and weaving, till he has a house large enough to 
cover his body and turn around in. 
You can see how he looks in the picture. 
All this time he has not eaten a 
mouthful, and he never does till his 
S house is done. When he does eat, he 
cuts those tiny pin-holes you've seen in 
cloth, for he eats the solid cloth and not the loose hairs he builds 
with. 
He's a wise little creature, too. If you have a costly broadcloth 
by the side of a cheap woolen, the cunning little mother will settle 
her babies in the broadcloth, and leave the coarse woolen for less 
