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fect May-fly lays her eggs in a glutinous mass on water. Unlike most of her kind, she does not drop them singly, but, probably on account of the short time at her disposal, she deposits her three or four hundred tiny ova all together, and at the same moment.

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EPHEMERA LARVA.

EPHEMERA PUPA.

Those of the floating masses which escape the marauding hands of anglers, and the greedy appetites of birds, beasts, fishes and insects, are hatched in a few days into aquatic grubs.

As soon as the active little larva comes out of its shell, it seeks a convenient stone, underneath which it may dwell at the bottom of its native pond

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or stream, and either subsists on the mud, or, more probably, the decaying vegetable matter to be found in its subaqueous home. Although it lives in the water it breathes air; and, although it has legs, it does not always use them for purposes of locomotion. On either side of its body this wonderful little grub has six leaflets or false gills that serve in some

Occult way to separate the air which it breathes from the water in which it lives, and they are also used in swimming.

The next, or pupa, stage presents very little alteration in the appearance or habits of our embryo ephemera. Except for the disclosure of rudimentary wings on its sides, no change either in body or habit is discerned, until after two years' frolic in its watery home the pupa begins to feel a longing to breathe the air of heaven, and seeking the bank of its native stream, crawls into a dry sunlit spot, and from the earth-devouring chrysalis bursts the ethereal May

fly.

Even now, however, the insect is not in its perfect state. When released from its pupa covering, away it flies, often to a considerable distance, selects some

object to which it may cling with its claws, and then takes place perhaps the most wonderful event in the life of the ephemera. Those shining fragile wings which seem too delicate to carry through the air even so light a thing as the insect's body, have yet to cast another coat before they are perfected. The long, slender filaments at the end of the fly's abdomen have also a covering useless to the creature in the short life before it. Even the legs, the body, and the head are swathed in a perfectly fitting garment. As it clings, the perfect fly draws itself out of this covering as a hand is drawn out of a glove, and takes its last flight, leaving behind it an empty skin so exactly like itself, that the cast-off robe has, at first sight, been taken for the living insect.

Such are the wonderful changes undergone by creatures destined to live but a few hours in a state of perfection, and which appear in such multitudes that cart-loads of them have been collected and used for the fertilisation of the earth on which, as grubs, they have probably subsisted.

"Some to the sun their insect wings unfold,
Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold;
Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight,
Their fluid bodies half dissolv'd in light;
Loose to the wind their airy garments flow,
Thin glittering textures of the filmy dew,
Dip't in the richest tincture of the skies,
Where light disports in ever-mingling dyes,
While every beam new transient colours flings,

Colours that change whene'er they wave their wings."

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M

CHAPTER XXIV.

LONG-LIVED
DESTROYERS.

THE seed sown in spring and
watered by the early rains

comes up a tiny green blade from the earth, grows and ripens with the year, bringing forth fruit after its kind. As the autumn advances, the wavy corn is browned in the rays of the ardent sun, and the reapers go forth to gather in the harvest. The bold, flaming poppy, the gentle cornflower, and the wide-awake ox-eyed daisy fall, with the goldeneared wheat, whose companions they have been from their birth, under the sweep of the sharp scythe or sickle. The life of the field-flowers is over,

Their glory and beauty is a thing of the past, they are forgotten, and they wither into blackness as the shocks of

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