r of indigobirds. Their range of
food is probably very limited. I have never chanced to see them taking
food of any kind.

How crowded with life every square rod of the fields and woods is, if we
look closely enough! Beneath my leafy canopy on the edge of the beech
woods where I now and then seek refuge from a hot wave, reclining on a
cushion of dry leaves or sitting with my back against a cool, smooth
exposure of the outcropping place rock, I am in a mood to give myself up
to a day of little things. And the little things soon come trooping or
looping along.

I see a green measuring-worm taking the dimensions of the rim of my
straw hat which lies on the dry leaves beside me. It humps around it in
an aimless sort of way, stopping now and then and rearing up on its hind
legs and feeling the vacant space around it as a blind man might hunt
for a lost trail. I know what it wants: it is on its travels looking for
a place in which to go through that wonderful transformation of creeping
worm into a winged creature. In its higher stage of being it is a little
silvery moth, barely an inch across, and, like other moths, has a brief
season of life and love, the female depositing its eggs in some suitable
place and then dying or falling a victim to the wood pewee or some other
bird. After some minutes of groping and humping about on my hat and on
dry twigs and leaves, it is lost to my sight.

A little later a large black worm comes along. It is an inch and a
quarter long, and is engaged in the same quest as its lesser brother of
the green, transparent coat. Magnify it enough times, say, many thousand
times, and what a terrible-looking monster we should have--a traveling
arch of contracting and stretching muscular tissue, higher than your
head, and measuring off the ground a rod or more at a time, or standing
twenty feet or more high, like some dragon of the prime. But now it is a
puny insect of which the caroling vireo overhead would quickly dispose.

With a twig I lift it to a maple sapling close by and watch it go
looping up the trunk. Evidently it doesn't know just where it wants to
go, but it finally strikes a small sugar maple and humps up that. By
chance it strikes one of the branches six feet from the ground and goes
looping up that. Then, by chance, in its aimless reachings it hits one
of three small branches and climbs that a foot or more, and a dry twig,
six or eight inches long, is seized and explored. At the end of i