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They did not leave their libraries and repair to the backyard to catch a few caterpillars and look at these animals and study them in their native haunts.
They both flew down to the ground, then back to the tree. And every time they travelled they had little pieces of grass or bark in their bills. But Mother Oriole did most of this work, which was quite proper, for mothers always do most of the work about the house, don't they? Father Oriole, you see, was more interested in getting fat beetles and caterpillars for food. And that was quite right too.
It is so peppered with these, that failure to identify it is impossible. These caterpillars pupate in the ground. I knew that, but this was before I had learned that the caterpillar worked out a hole in the ground, and the pupa case only touched the earth upon which it lay.
We have not taken many steps before we are led to pause and inquire why there should be little patches of grey-looking mud in the small angles of the brickwork of the house. Opening one of the patches with a penknife we find a hollow cell, and in it some green caterpillars just alive but not able to crawl.
When the caterpillars leave the silk pouch, to go and browse at night, and also when they enter it again, they never fail to spin a little on the surface of their nest. Each expedition adds to the thickness of the wall.
One seems to enter in a dream a temple of enormous entomology, whose architecture is based on something wilder than arms or backbones; in which the ribbed columns have the half-crawling look of dim and monstrous caterpillars; or the dome is a starry spider hung horribly in the void.
To see, as is not unfrequent, a promising apple-tree, cherry-tree, or damson-tree, fading under the attack of the caterpillars of the Winter Moth, makes ARPACHSHAD a new man. His back unbends, his wrinkles smooth out, the gleam of faded youth reillumines his countenance, and his eyes melt in softer glance. "The flies hev got at them honions," he said, on this Spring afternoon.
O Reaumur, who used to invite marquises to see your caterpillars change their skins, what would you have said of a future disciple conversant with such wretchedness as this? Perhaps it is well that we should not be ignorant of it, so that we may take compassion on the sufferings of beasts. The Mouse so greatly desired is mine. I place her upon the centre of the brick.
Ambulances hurried backwards and forwards between the line and the Casualty Clearing Station, for the days of June were hard days for the infantry who dug the "leaping-off" trenches, and manned them afterwards through rain and raid and bombardment. Horse transport and new batteries hurried to their destinations. "Caterpillars" rumbled up, towing the heavier guns.
He liked most, though, to see them rising at the flies, as they sailed round and round under the shadow of the great oak, where the beetles fell flop into the water, and the green caterpillars let themselves down from the boughs by silk ropes for no reason at all; and then changed their foolish minds for no reason at all either; and hauled themselves up again into the tree, rolling up the rope in a ball between their paws; which is a very clever rope-dancer's trick, and neither Blondin nor Leotard could do it: but why they should take so much trouble about it no one can tell; for they cannot get their living, as Blondin and Leotard do, by trying to break their necks on a string.
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