“Apples and pears containing worms continue to grow; indeed, they ripen sooner than the others, but it is a sickly maturity that hastens the fall of the fruit. As a rule, the larva in wormy fruit that has fallen to the ground is by that time fully grown; accordingly, it leaves its domicile by the passage already made and creeps into some crevice in the bark of a tree, or sometimes it retires underground, after which it makes for itself a shell of silk mixed with fragments of wood or dead leaves, and turns into a moth the next year, when all the young apples and pears are ready to receive its eggs for the new generation. “In plums and apricots is found a worm closely resembling that infesting apples and pears; another occurs in chestnuts, and a third in pea-pods, the tender young peas furnishing excellent food for the intruder. All these worms are the larvæ of moths commonly named from the fruit or vegetable they infest. The pea-worm, after it has devoured the best part of the pod’s contents, passes into another pod by boring a round hole. Its moth appears in June, and the larva in July and August. Consequently, spring peas are never wormy, while those of late summer very often are. This example shows you how, in certain instances, a crop can be saved by hastening or delaying the sowing, according to the time when the ravagers may be expected to appear.” “But no such plan can be carried out with chestnuts,” said Emile. “That is plain enough, for chestnut-trees bear their nuts at a fixed time, and we can’t hurry them up or keep them back. The chestnut-moth comes just when the table is set for its young ones. What disgusting-looking worms they are, too—all red and soaked in their own juice in the chestnut-meat!” “We can’t do anything, either, for the apple-trees and the pear-trees, can we?” Louis inquired. “Not much. Some people gather the wormy apples and pears fallen from or still on the trees, and crush them to kill the worms inside. That makes so many enemies the fewer for the following year; but again it has to be admitted that, left to our own resources, we could never defend ourselves against the pyralis and other similar moths that produce larvæ from which hardly anything is safe. Fortunately the swallow catches these moths on the wing, bats chase them assiduously in the twilight, and the little gray lizard snaps them up when they alight on the trunks of trees. These are so many friends, protectors of our gardens and orchards.” “The moths you call by that queer name, pyralis—are there a good many of them?” asked Jules.