“Well, my children will be able to eat, I can tell you. See, I have laid my eggs on this bed of parsley. Ah! there’s a larva now. Not mine, but mine will be like it. See, he is green, ringed with black and yellow. If you tease him he will stick out his yellow horns at you, and you won’t like the odour either. Would you believe I was once like that, and I slept in a pupa case like the one under the twig there? You know there always comes a time in the life of every caterpillar, if he lives long enough of course, when he stops eating for good and wants nothing so much as to sleep. That came to me, and I crawled from the parsley bed to an old rail fence and began to spin. The silk was in my body, and it came through two tubes in my lower lip.” “That isn’t the way spiders spin,” said Ruth. “They——” “I was not a spider,” said Miss Papilio. “I was a caterpillar, and they always spin with their mouths. So that is what I did, and before long I had lashed myself securely to the fence by strong silken loops. Then I shed my pretty suit, and my skin shrivelled until it was a hard case. In that safe cradle I went to sleep, and came out in the Spring with six legs instead of sixteen, a slender tongue in place of sharp, hungry jaws, and, best of all, four beautiful wings. Oh, the joy of sailing through wonderful space, and sipping nectar from the sweetest flowers!” “We have all felt that way,” said a large red-brown butterfly, whose wings, lighter below, were veined and bordered by black, with a double row of white spots on the edges. “Look at the chrysalis from which I came, and say no more. Can you guess my name?” Ruth was obliged to confess that she could not. “I have often seen you though,” she added, “or butterflies just like you.” “Probably you have. I am called the monarch, and, frail as I look, I can fly hundreds of miles without resting. I was just laying some eggs on this milkweed, and since you are here, you might use your eyes a little. You may see something worth while.” Ruth was using her eyes as best she could, and soon she spied a number of caterpillars chewing away upon the milkweed leaves. They were lemon or greenish-yellow, banded with black. “Will they grow into butterflies like you?” she asked. “Yes,” was the answer, “but there is something more to see.” Again Ruth looked, and now saw what appeared to be a little green jewel dotted with golden nails. “Oh!” she cried, “how lovely!” “I thought you would say that,” and the monarch fluttered her wings proudly. “That is our chrysalis, the cradle in which we sleep for our great transformation. That is one thing the viceroy can’t do, though she mimics us as much as possible.” “Mimics you?” repeated Ruth, in surprise.