When the insects have done working, the cocoons are taken from the sticks, and a few being selected to breed from, the rest are prepared for unwinding. The insects enclosed are first killed, either by putting them in bags and enclosing them for half an hour in an oven heated to 88°; or by putting them in sieves, and, after covering them closely with a woollen cloth, placing the sieves over boiling water or boiling spirits of any kind. The insects being killed, the loose or floss silk is removed from the cocoons, and they are put by handfuls into basins of hot water, which has been heated almost to the boiling point; and the cocoons are stirred round in it for a few minutes with a whisk of broom. In a very short time the gum with which the insect had covered the cocoon is dissolved, and the loose threads beginning to float on the water, five or six of them are collected, and the reeling of the silk begins. If well fed and kept in a proper temperature, the caterpillars will finish their labours twenty-four days after they are hatched. An ounce of eggs will produce about forty thousand caterpillars, which will consume nearly eleven hundred pounds of leaves, and will produce about eighty pounds of cocoons, or eight pounds of raw silk. BOOK IV. RURAL WALKS. LETTER XVII. SHOES AND APPARATUS FOR WALKING.--RURAL SEATS.--NATURAL OBJECTS NOTED IN A COUNTRY WALK: THE MOLE; THE SHRIKE; THE BLACK SNAIL; THE SILLER CUPS; THE WOUNDWORT.--PLEASURES OF STUDYING BOTANY.--GRANITE.--APPEARANCE OF THE CLOUDS. It gives me the greatest pleasure, my dear Annie, to find that you are entering so warmly into country pursuits, and I have read over repeatedly the passage in which you thank me for having taught you to love the country, and in which you say that when you look at your beautiful garden (now so brilliant with bright scarlet verbenas and golden-yellow calceolarias, that you can scarcely gaze at it in the sunshine), and that when you sit in your light cheerful room, or wander near the house, and see in one direction the village church peeping through the trees, and in another a river winding like a silver riband through the valley, you can scarcely believe it is the same place as that which struck you as the very palace of gloominess only a few months ago. "The very rooms themselves seem changed," you add, "and even the situation of the house; for, instead of being buried in a deep valley, and surrounded by a thick forest which rose on every side as if to entomb it, and which appeared to forbid the possibility of walking out, it is now every thing I could desire, and I would not alter it even if I had Aladdin's lamp."