Miss Elliot's Girls Stories of Beasts, Birds, and Butterflies

Excerpt

CHAPTER I.

Sammy Ray was running by the parsonage one day when Miss Ruth called to him. She was sitting in the vine-shaded porch, and there was a crutch leaning against her chair.

"Sammy," she said, "isn't there a field of tobacco near where you live?"

"Yes'm; two of 'em."

"To-morrow morning look among the tobacco plants and find me a large green worm. Have you ever seen a tobacco worm?"

Sammy grinned.

"I've killed more'n a hundred of 'em this summer," he said. "Pat Heeley hires me to smash all I can find, 'cause they eat the tobacco."

"Well, bring one carefully to me on the leaf where he is feeding; the largest one you can find."

Before breakfast the next morning Ruth Elliot had her first sight of a tobacco worm.

"Take care!" said Sammy, "or he'll spit tobacco juice on you. See that horn on his tail? When you want to kill him, you jest catch hold this way, and"—

"But I don't want to kill him," she said. "I want to keep him in this nice little house I have got ready for him, and give him all the tobacco he can eat. Will you bring me a fresh leaf every, morning?"

While she was speaking she had put the worm in a box with a cover of pink netting. On his way home Sammy met Roy Tyler, and told him (as a secret) that the lame lady at the minister's house kept worms, and would pay two cents a head for tobacco worms. "Anyway," said Sammy, "that's what she paid me."

If there was money to be got in the tobacco-worm business, Roy wanted a share in it; and before night he brought to Miss Ruth, in an old tin basin, eight worms of various sizes, from a tiny baby worm just hatched, to a great, ugly creature, jet black, and spotted and barred with yellow. The black worm Miss Ruth consented to keep, and Roy, lifting him by his horn, dropped him on the green worm's back.

"Now you have a Blacky and a Greeny," the boy said; and by these names they were called.

Roy and Sammy came together the next morning, and watched the worms at their breakfast.

"How they eat!" said Sammy; "they make their great jaws go like a couple of old tobacco-chewers."

"Yes; and if they lived on bread and butter 't would cost a lot to feed 'em, wouldn't it?" said Roy.

"Look at my woodbine worm, boys," Miss Ruth said, as she lifted the cover of another box. "Isn't he a beauty? See the delicate green, shaded to white, on his back, and that row of spots down his sides looking like buttons! I call him Sly-boots, because he has a trick of hiding under the leaves. He used to have a horn on his tail like the tobacco worms."

"Where that spot is, that looks like an eye?"

"Yes; and one day he ate nothing and hid himself away, and looked so strangely that I thought he was going to die; but the next morning he appeared in this beautiful new coat."

"How funny! Say, what is he going to turn into?"

But Miss Ruth was busy house-cleaning. First she turned out her tenants. They were at breakfast; but they took their food with them, and did not mind. Then she tipped their house upside down, and brushed out every stick and stem and bit of leaf, spread thick brown paper on the floor, and put back Greeny and Blacky snug and comfortable.

The next time Sammy and Roy met at the parsonage, three flower-pots of moist sand stood in a row under the bench.

"Winter quarters," Miss Ruth explained when she saw the boys looking at them; "and it's about time for my tenants to move in. Greeny and Blacky have stopped eating, and Sly-boots is turning pale."

"A worm turn pale!"

"Yes, indeed; look at him."

It was quite true; the green on his back had changed to gray-white, and his pretty spots were fading....