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Updated: August 28, 2024
It is, therefore, probable that the Ailantus would be the most suitable European tree for the Atlas, and the oak for the Mylitta." I did not receive a single cocoon of this species for the season 1881. My stock consisted of seven cocoons, from the lot received from Calcutta at the end of February, 1880.
The tree at my window was an ailantus, of stately dimensions, and bounteous in a proportionate enormity of smell; yet it had never before affected me so much as on this night, when I lay dozing in the ghastly gloom.
All the rest, the close, dingy room, with the ailantus tree and the high wall beyond, the sickening sweetish odour with which she was unfamiliar, the waxen mask and the blank, drooping eyes of the woman; all these things seemed to exist not in her actual surroundings, but in some hideous dream from which she was struggling to awake.
For the first time, as stated before, I attempted the rearing of a small number of Atlas larvae in the open air on the ailantus tree, but had to remove the last two remaining larvae in September; the others had all disappeared in consequence of the heavy and incessant rains. These larvae were from eggs sent to me by one of my German correspondents.
I abandoned that plan, and resolved to go to a grove not heretofore invaded, being absolutely impenetrable from undergrowth. My way led across a cornfield, over stone walls, through thickets and bushes everywhere. Many other birds I startled, and at last came a chat's "mew" from a wild jungle of ailantus and brambles, which nothing less effective than an axe could pass through.
Knowing the points frequented by the two Megachiles, I planted in their work-yard, overgrown with briar and lilac, two outlandish plants which seemed to me to fulfil the required conditions of suppleness of texture, namely, the ailantus, a native of Japan, and the Virginian physostegia.
But there are times in the dank, hot nights of midsummer, when the ailantus is but a diluted upas-antiar of Macassar, tainting, albeit with no deadly essence, the muggy air that rocks its slumbering branches and rolls away thence along the parapets and in at the windows of the sleepers.
As she went forward there floated to her a heavy, sweetish scent which seemed to her to be the very breath of despair. Her first thought was that the sun had gone under a cloud; the next instant she perceived that the window was shaded by a ragged ailantus tree and that beyond the tree there was a high brick wall which shut out the daylight.
He invariably slept on the floor, converting his room, indeed, into the general semblance of a tent, by divesting it of all the appliances dear to a Christian gentleman, and one who loves to repose as such. Yet there was comparative freshness in that tent-like apartment, as I entered it that night, shutting the door of mine after me, to prevent ailantus and upas-antiar from following in my wake.
It was a close evening; there were dark clouds coming up in the direction of the turnpike road, but the leaves of the ailantus hung heavy and motionless in the hush of an impending storm.
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