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Cornugaya Directory 04
I have met with no traces of the Virgin during the years between her
Presentation in the Temple and her becoming head girl at Temple
College. These years, we may be assured, can hardly have been other
than eventful; but incidents, or bits of life, are like living
forms--it is only here and here, as by rare chance, that one of them
gets arrested and fossilised; the greater number disappear like the
greater number of antediluvian molluscs, and no one can say why one
of these flies, as it were, of life should get preserved in amber
more than another. Talk, indeed, about luck and cunning; what a
grain of sand as against a hundredweight is cunning's share here as
against luck's. What moment could be more humdrum and unworthy of
special record than the one chosen by the artist for the chapel we
are considering? Why should this one get arrested in its flight and
made immortal when so many worthier ones have perished? Yet
preserved it assuredly is; it is as though some fairy's wand had
struck the medieval Miss Pinkerton, Amelia Sedley, and others who do
duty instead of the Hebrew originals. It has locked them up as
sleeping beauties, whose charms all may look upon. Surely the hours
are like the women grinding at the mill--the one is taken and the
other left, and none can give the reason more than he can say why
Gallio should have won immortality by caring for none of "these
things."
A comparatively small number of insects pass the winter in the larval
or active stage of the young. Of these, perhaps the best known is the
brown "woolly worm" or "hedgehog caterpillar," as it is familiarly
called. It is thickly covered with stiff black hairs on each end, and
with reddish hairs on the middle of the body. These hairs appear to be
evenly and closely shorn, so as to give the animal a velvety look; and
as they have a certain degree of elasticity, and the caterpillar curls
up at the slightest touch, it generally manages to slip away when
taken into the hand. Beneath loose bark, boards, rails, and stones,
this caterpillar may be found in mid-winter, coiled up and apparently
lifeless. On the first bright, sunny days of spring it may be seen
crawling rapidly over the ground, seeking the earnest vegetation which
will furnish it a literal "breakfast." In April or May the chrysalis,
surrounded by a loose cocoon formed of the hairs of the body
interwoven with coarse silk, may be found in situations similar to
those in which the larva passed the winter. From this, the perfect
insect, the Isabella tiger moth, _Pyrrharctia isabella_ Smith, emerges
about the last of June. It is a medium sized moth, dull orange in
color, with three rows of small black spots on the body, and some
scattered spots of the same color on the wings.
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