or smell, perhaps by both senses, soon learned where to go for his dinner.

"And so he lived and thrived for a fortnight, and I had hopes of keeping him till spring; but one cold night the furnace fire went out, and in the morning my pretty swallow-tail lay dead on the window-sill. Wasn't it a pity?

"Oh," said Florence, "I like to hear about butterflies! Will you please tell us about some of the other kinds you have kept?"

"Tell us about that big fellow you said every body made a fuss over. Ce-ce—I can't remember what you called him."

"Cecropia!" said Susie, promptly. "Yes, do, Auntie! if you are not tired."

If Ruth Elliot had been ever so weary I think she would have forgotten it at sight of the interested faces of her audience; but in fact she was not in the least tired, but was as pleased to tell as they were to listen to the story of

THE CECROPIA MOTH.

"One day in November," she said, "a man who used to do odd jobs about the place for my father, and whom we always called Josh,—his name was Joshua Wheeler,—left his work to bring to the house and put into my hand a queer-looking pod-shaped package firmly fastened to a stout twig. It was of a rusty gray color and looked as much like a thick wad of dirty brown paper as any thing I can think of.

"'I found this 'ere cur'us lookin' thing,' he said, 'under a walnut-tree on the hill yonder, where I was rakin' up leaves—an', thinks I, there's some kind of a crittur stored away inside, an' Miss Ruth she's crazy arter bugs an' worms an' sich like varmints, an' mebbe she'd like to see what comes out o' this 'ere; so I've fetched it along.'

"You may be sure I thanked him heartily and gave him a sixpence besides, which I am afraid went to buy tobacco. 'Law, Doctor, don't I know it?' Josh used to reply when my father urged him to break off a habit that was making a shaky old man of him at sixty; 'don't I know it's a dretful bad habit; but then you see a body must have somethin' to be a-chawin' on.'

"But what was in the brown package? That was the question I puzzled my brains over. I had never seen a cocoon in the least like it before, and I had no book on entomology to help me. With the point of a needle I carefully picked away the outer layer till I came to loose silken fibers that evidently were the covering of an inside case. Whatever was there was snugly tucked away in a little inner chamber with the key inside, and I must wait with what patience I could command till he chose to open the door.

"I kept my precious cocoon all winter in a cold, dry place; but when warm spring weather came it lay in state on my work-table, in a box lined with cotton, where I could watch it all day long. Nothing happened till one bright day in June I heard a faint scratching inside the brown case. It grew louder and louder every moment. Evidently my tenant was bestirring himself and, with intervals of rest, was scraping and tearing away his silken wrappings. Presently an opening was made and out of this were poked two bushy legs with claws that held fast by the outside of his house, while the creature gradually pulled himself out.

"First a head with horns; then a part of the body and two more legs; then, with one tremendous effort, he was free!—an odd beast of no particular color, looking exceedingly damp and disagreeable, with his fat chunky body and short legs, like an exaggerated bumble-bee, only not at all pretty. He was shaky on his legs and half tumbled from his box to the window-sill, along which he walked trembling till he came to the tassel of the shade, just within his reach. This he grabbed with all four claws, his wings hanging down.

"'It's nothing but a homely old brown bug!' said my brother Charlie, whom I had called to see the sight.

"'No,' I said, "'it isn't a bug. I'm sure I don't know what it is,'

"I was ready to cry with disappointment and vexation, for I had expected great things from my brown chrysalis.

"The tassel was gently swaying with the weight of the clumsy creature, and in the warm sunshine which was gradually drying body and wings faint colors began to show—a dull red, a dash of white, a wavy band of gray, with patches of soft brown that began to look downy like feathers. Every moment these colors grew more distinct and took new shapes. None of them were bright, but they were beautifully blended and the whole body was of the texture of the finest velvet.

"But the wings! How can I describe to you how those thick, crumpled, unsightly appendages grew and grew, changing in color from a dingy black to a dark brown, with bands of gray and red? how the great white patches took distinct form, and some were dashed with red and bordered with black, and others eye-shaped with crescents of pale blue? It must have taken an hour for all this to come about—for the great wings to unfurl to their widest extent and the cecropia moth to show himself in all his beauty to our admiring gaze.

"The whole family had gathered to see the show. My father lingered, hat and riding-whip in hand, though he had a round of twenty miles to make among his patients before night; and Aunt Susan, who was on a visit, stood peering through her spectacles, too much absorbed to notice black Dinah taking a nap in her work-basket and the kitten making sad havoc with her knitting. Josh was called in from the wood-shed, and, with his hat on the back of his head and hands deep in his pockets, gazed in silence.

"'Wal,' he said at length, 'if that don't beat all natur'! Look at the size of that crittur, will you, and the hole he's jest crawled out of. Why, he's as big as a full-grown bat, measures full seven inches across from wing to wing. Wal, now, I'd gin consider'ble to know what's be'n goin' on for a spell back in that leetle house where he's passed his time; and I'll bet, Doctor, with all your larnin', you can't tell.'"

CHAPTER V.

FURRY-PURRY BECOMING GOLD ELSIE.

Miss Ruth found on her table the next Wednesday afternoon a note very neatly and carefully written, which read as follows:—

Miss RUTH,—Will you Please tell us Another Cat Story, becaus I like them best. So does Fannie Eldridge she said So after You told Worm stories.

Miss Ruth I Have Named my Black Kitty After your Dinah Diamond, her Last Name has to Be Spot Becaus her Spot is not a Diamond, this is from your Friend.

NELLIE DIMOCK.

"I hold in my hand," Miss Ruth said, when she had carefully perused this epistle, "a written request from two members of our Society for another cat story. Susie and Mollie, have I any more cat stories worth telling?"

"Yes, indeed, Auntie" said Mollie. "Don't you remember the pretty fairy story you used to tell us about the good little girl who saved a cat from being drowned by some bad boys, and carried her home? and she turned out to be a fairy cat and gave that girl every thing she wished for—cakes and candy, and a lovely pink silk frock packed in a nutshell for her to wear to the party?"

"O Mollie! that's too much of a baby story," said Susie. "Tell us about the musical cat who played the piano by walking over the keys, and all the people in the house thought it was a ghost."

"Yes, Auntie; and the funny story of the cat and the parrot—how the parrot got stuck up to her knees in a pan of dough, and in her fright said over every thing she had learned to say: 'Polly wants a cracker!' 'Oh, my goodness' sakes alive!' 'Get out, I say!' 'Here's a row!' 'Scat, you beast!' and so on;—and how the cat got her out."

"These are old stories, girls, and you have told them for me."

"Our old cat Jane," said Eliza Ann Jones, "is a regular cheat. You see, she would lie in grandma's chair. She used to jump in if grandma