Summer Rest Author:Gail Hamilton 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: LARVA LESSONS. BOUT this matter of June there is a great deal to be said on both sides. June has a great reputation, — June, beloved of youth and maidens... more », — June, dear to poets. " What is so rare as a day in June! Then if ever come perfect days," or something like that, sighs the knight of Laun- fals, and all June-lovers swell the chorus; but June has another side to her shield that shines with a different and a less lustrous light. June roses have woven wreathes for many a lay, but I went out to my rose-bushes this morning, after a few days' absence, and behold! havoc and ravage ; for delicate green leaves, only wiry skeletons, from which life and loveliness had departed. Near the ground, to the brown, mottled stalk clung the cause, — a great gluttonous caterpillar, full to the brim of pulpy parenchyma, and dreaming his dull larvic dreams in stupid satisfaction. A whisking stick soon snapped him off into space ; but will myrose-buds be able to grow into full-blown beauty with lungs so frightfully diseased ? Over against the rose-bush stands a young apple-tree, faint and feeble with the repeated charges of a battalion of canker-worms. The other night a high wind blew, and the old elm-tree was depopulated; at least, if one might judge from the population that suddenly appeared around it and beneath it. The canker-worms, flung off by the wind, spun down from the window-frames, looped up the doorposts, spanned along the fences, tormenting us before the time. They knew it, too. They felt in their gelatinous frames that their hour was not yet come ; so, instead of scooping out their little graves, they began a toilsome "homeward bound!" up, up, up into the old elm-tree, if possible, but, at all events, up, by such slow, painful, intermittent lunges. and loops, that one ...« less