g, without a moment's pause, he was pushing his way. I watched him
till I was tired; but when I left him he was still on his travels.

"In the afternoon, however, he had settled himself half-way up the side
of his house. His head was moving slowly from side to side, and a fine
white thread was coming out of his mouth. When I looked again he had
fastened himself to the box by the tip of his tail and by a loop of fine
silk passing round the upper part of his body. There he hung motionless
two, three, almost four, days. The green and orange and black faded
little by little, his body shrank to half its size, and he looked
withered, unsightly, dead. I thought he _was_ dead; but Tim Rhodes (who
all along had shown a friendly interest in my pursuit) took a look at my
poor dead worm,' and pronounced him all right.

"'Keep a watch on him this afternoon,' said Tim,' and you'll see
something queer,'

"So we did; and Aunt Susan was summoned to the porch by the news that
'the worm had split in the back and was coming out of his skin.' By the
time she had got on her glasses and was ready to witness this wonderful
sight, it was over. A heap of dried skin lay in the bottom of the box,
and a pretty chrysalis of a delicate green color hung in place of the
worm.

"'O Auntie!' said Charlie, 'you ought to have seen him twist and squirm
and make the split in his back bigger and bigger till it burst open and
tumbled off, just as a boy wriggles out of a tight coat, you know!'

"After this came three weeks of waiting, during which the green
chrysalis turned gray and hard and the other worms, one by one, went
through the same changes, until four gray chrysalis were fastened to the
sides of the box.

"Every day I looked, but nothing happened, until it seemed to me, tired
of waiting, that nothing ever _would_ happen. But one bright morning I
forgot all my weariness when I found, clinging to the netting, a
beautiful creature like the one we saw on the honeysuckle this
afternoon, with a slender black body and wings spotted with yellow and
scarlet and lovely blue. When I opened the box he didn't try to fly. He
was weak and trembling, and his wings were damp, but every moment they
grew larger and his colors brighter in the sunshine.

"While Charlie and I stood watching him, we discussed, in our own way, a
problem that has puzzled wiser heads than ours--how three distinct
individuals (the worm, the chrysalis, and the butterfly) could be one
and