way all his own. The
elongated cocoon, looking like a silken finger, is woven about a leaf of
sassafras. Even the long stem of the leaf is silk-girdled, and a strong
band is looped about the twig to which the leaf is attached. Here, when
all the leaves fall, he hangs, the plaything of every breeze, attracting
the attention of all the hungry birds. But little does Prometheus care.
Sparrows may hover about him and peck in vain; chickadees may clutch the
dangling finger and pound with all their tiny might. Prometheus is
"bound," indeed, and merely swings the faster, up and down, from side to
side.

It is interesting to note that when two Prometheus cocoons, fastened upon
their twigs, were suspended in a large cageful of native birds, it took a
healthy chickadee just three days of hard pounding and unravelling to
force a way through the silken envelopes to the chrysalids within. Such
long continued and persistent labour for so comparatively small a morsel
of food would not be profitable or even possible out-of-doors in winter.
The bird would starve to death while forcing its way through the
protecting silk.

These are only four of the many hundreds of cocoons, from the silken
shrouds on the topmost branches to the jugnecked chrysalis of a sphinx
moth--offering us the riddle of a winter's shelter buried in the cold,
dark earth.

Is everything frozen tight? Has Nature's frost mortar cemented every stone
in its bed? Then cut off the solid cups of the pitcher plants, and see
what insects formed the last meal of these strange growths,--ants, flies,
bugs, encased in ice like the fossil insects caught in the amber sap which
flowed so many thousands of years ago.

When the fierce northwestern blast
Cools sea and land so far and fast,
Thou already slumberest deep;
Woe and want thou canst outsleep.

Emerson.

CHAMELEONS IN FUR AND FEATHER

The colour of things in nature has been the subject of many volumes and
yet it may be truthfully said that no two naturalists are wholly agreed on
the interpretation of the countless hues of plants and animals. Some
assert that all alleged instances of protective colouring and mimicry are
merely the result of accident; while at the opposite swing of the pendulum
we find theories, protective and mimetic, for the colours of even the tiny
one-celled green plants which