You remember Polyphemus had not left all her eggs in one place. Some of them were on oak leaves. Some were on elm leaves, and some she had put on the leaves of a maple tree.
The eggs stayed on the leaves for ten days. At first they were white with a brown line around them. After a time they turned brown all over.
Then the babies in the eggs were ready to come out of their shells. Each baby set to work and bit a hole in the side of his egg shell.
Polyphemus had no mouth, to be sure. But her babies had mouths. And such funny mouths! They did not open up and down, as your mouth does. They opened from side to side. The babies did not have soft lips either. They had hard horny jaws.
With these jaws the babies bit their way out of the egg shells. Perhaps they liked the taste of those egg shells. At any rate, as soon as they were out, they turned round and ate up the shells.
Now I suppose you think these babies were wee, wee moths, with brown wings and blue eye-spots. But they were not moths at all. They were tiny yellow caterpillars with big red heads.
These tiny caterpillars could not fly like their mother. But, oh, how they could eat! They did not have far to go to find food. What they wanted to eat was leaves. And there were leaves under them and over them and all about them. So they ate and ate and ate. They hardly needed to move.
And the little caterpillars grew and grew and grew and grew! When they were seven weeks old, they were fully grown. They were more than four thousand times as heavy as when they came out of the eggs. Think of that! Why, if you grew like that, you would weigh about forty thousand pounds when you were grown. You would weigh as much as twenty tons of coal.
When they were grown, the caterpillars were as long as a man’s finger and as thick as his thumb. Their coats were a beautiful bright green color. Down each side of their bodies was a row of bright spots.
These spots had been red at first. But now they were bright yellow. At the bottom of each spot was a dot the color of silver or gold. The spots looked like gold buttons on a beautiful coat of bright green cloth.
The grown caterpillars looked very fierce. If anyone troubled one of them, the caterpillar quickly turned the front half of his body to one side. He then looked as if he were ready to strike. But caterpillars cannot hurt any one.
Just back of the caterpillar’s head were three pair of jointed legs. They were his real feet, but he did not walk with them. He used them just as if they were hands with fingers. He used them to hold a leaf to his mouth.
What the caterpillar walked with were not real feet at all. There were five pairs of them. They were on the back part of the body. They were very short legs, but they were not jointed.
Now that the caterpillars were grown they stopped eating. They would never eat again as long as they lived.
The caterpillars began to creep about as if they were looking for something. By and by one of them stopped running. He had found what he was looking for. It was a place to make a cocoon.
At last the caterpillar chose a big green leaf. Caterpillars often make their cocoons on leaves or twigs. If you were to catch a caterpillar and put him into a box, he would make his cocoon in a corner of the box.
Then the caterpillar began to make silk. The silk came out of a tiny opening between his hard jaws. It was soft and wet at first, but it changed to silk as soon as it was out in the air.
The caterpillar moved his head over the part of the leaf he had chosen for his cocoon. Back and forth, back and forth he moved it. Every move he made he left a thread of silk sticking to the leaf. By and by there was a thick mat of silk big enough for him to stretch out upon.
Now the caterpillar began to spin a bag of silk around himself. He held on to his silk mat and tossed his head about. He twisted and turned his body. He spun and spun and spun.
At first you could see the busy little worker moving about inside the case he was making. By and by the case became so thick you could not see through it at all, but inside the caterpillar was moving, back and forth, back and forth.
The caterpillar never broke his thread. And before he was done, he had spun out more than eight hundred feet of silk. A big spool of silk thread has only three hundred feet of silk on it. So you see the caterpillar had spun almost three times as much as is on a big spool of thread.
You see, too, why the caterpillar had eaten and eaten and eaten and eaten. He made his silk of the food he had eaten while he was growing up.
When the cocoon was finished, the caterpillar inside it was very small. No wonder! He had turned almost half of himself into silk thread. He lay very still inside his cocoon. You might have thought he was dead.
By and by, inside the cocoon, the skin on the caterpillar’s back split. It seemed to shrink. It slipped back. The caterpillar wriggled a little. The skin slipped back still farther. Then it slipped off.
The caterpillar was no longer a caterpillar. He looked something like a little egg. He was yellow at first. By and by he turned dark brown. He had turned into a pupa.
The pupa had no feet, no wings, and no mouth. It could not eat or walk or fly. It could only lie still and sleep.
The pupa lay through the winter in the silk cocoon. When spring came, it would wake. It would break out of the cocoon. Its wings would grow, and it would become a beautiful moth.
Nguồn: Wikisource English — By the Roadside (Dunn and Troxell)/The Polyphemus Children. Văn bản được nhập và định dạng lại; CC BY-SA 4.0, có thể áp dụng điều khoản bổ sung của tác phẩm.