The Population Of An Old Pear Tree

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III A TRAGEDY IX THE GRASS. Next came a cockchafer, big, heavy, and rough-footed, tumbling about like a comfortable citizen who has stayed too long at the public- house, and is going home a good deal too late, and pretty well scared at being alone. He took long steps but did not get on much, for he was blinded by the sunlight, and his great tail dragged in the sand. At first sight one would have thought that he had been feasting too deeply on the branches of the old Pear-Tree, and that some drops of dew had disturbed his brain. Yet this idea would have been very incorrect; for in truth the poor creature was only dazzled, and certainly so might any one have been in his place, for he had just made his entrance into the world. Four years before, on a fine June evening, his mother had dug a trench in the ground at the foot of the great tree, and laid some oblong eggs in it of a pale yellow colour. When she had satisfactorily accomplished this, returning above ground she inhaled the balmy breaths of air in a melancholy mood; and after having spent a few days on a leafy branch, at last fell from it and died amid the stalks of a forget-me-not. She had laid her eggs side by side; and as time went by, and they felt the reviving influences of spring, they gradually changed their colour. At last thence issued certain six-footed white larvae, and among them our cockchafer, then only a humble worm?a kind of false caterpillar with five rings. His head was scaly, hard, and rather brown; there were two great eyes in it, and it had strong jaws, finished off by a pair of short antennae. Almost with his first breath of life began sharp twinges in the region of the stomach, and he set ravenously to work, with a fierce burning, insatiable appetite. He grew and changed his ...

Excerpt from The Population of an Old Pear-Tree: Or, Stories of Insect Life When certain blue spirits begin to flit about me, I depart from my study to go and read, in what I am allowed, even by my clerical uncle, to call my book of devotions. The devotions I mean are not in my bookcase. No publisher, if he ever thought of such a thing, could bring them out. They are a page of the book of Nature, opened in the country, under blue sky, displayed at all seasons. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.