Part 55

If we look, we will also find other larvae shells. Down in the grass are the cast-off coats of the grasshoppers and the crickets.

All we need do is to look, and we shall be sure to find them--like unsubstantial ghosts of the active little wearers.

No doubt you all have heard of the seventeen-year locusts. They, too, are cicadas, and they look very much like this one, only it takes the young ones seventeen years to complete their growth.

Think of living in the ground and sucking the juices out of the earth and of tree roots for seventeen years!

How would you like to do it?

But no doubt the cicada is quite happy living in this way.

At the end of seventeen years the cicadas come up out of the earth in great swarms.

They cast their skins for the last time. The queer little shells are seen everywhere, and the air resounds with the songs of the freed prisoners.

In the South it takes only thirteen years for these cicadas to develop.

I once went up the side of a beautiful mountain in North Carolina, where was such a mighty host of cicadas in the trees that I could not hear my companion speak, and a little way off the noise sounded like a torrent of rushing water.

THE ODD SPITTLE INSECT

Why, little Nell! What is the matter?

You do wish the frogs would stop spitting on the grass?

Let me see; why, poor child, she is all covered with frog spittle.

That is kind, Ned. See, he is wiping her apron off with some fresh, clean leaves. Let us rest awhile under this shady tree.

John, pick that grass blade with the frog spittle on it. Be careful not to disturb it.

There is a surprise in store for you; this white frothy substance that is so abundant in some places in the summer and that looks like spittle is--guess what?

Frog spittle, May says. So you think the frogs spit on the grass do you? They must be tall frogs to reach up so high.

With this little twig let us carefully brush away the white froth.

Now see.

Yes, there is something in the centre of it.

It is the larva of a--bug!

The female bug, and here is one of the little things, lays the egg on the leaf or twigs, and when it hatches the young bug sucks out the sap of the plant which finally appears as this white froth.

The larva remains surrounded by the froth until its transformations are complete.

Just before the last moult it stops sucking out sap. The froth dries about it in the form of a little room, and in this it undergoes its last moult and comes out--an adult bug.

The froth is supposed to be used as a protection, and it may be against some enemies, but there are certain wasps that delight in invading the frothy masses and hauling out the unwilling morsels within to feed to their young.

No, little Nell, the frogs have nothing whatever to do with this frothy substance which was called frog spittle before people understood about the little insect that made it.

They really thought the frogs did it.