The moth must break its chrysalis.

All else is bare, but prophetic: buds everywhere, the whole splendor of the coming summer concentrated in those hard little knobs on every bough; and clinging here and there among them, a brown, papery chrysalis, from which shall yet wave the superb wings of the Luna moth.

Why, there is not a heap of dead leaves among which by picking it through carefully you might not find some twenty species of delicate and elegant land-shells; hardly a tree-foot at which, among the moss and mould, you might not find the chrysalides of beautiful moths, where caterpillars have crawled down the trunk in autumn, to lie there self-buried and die to live again next spring in a new and fairer shape.

"Do I deserve a fate like this, Who've ever acted well, Since first I left the chrysalis, And fluttered from my shell?

"Say, rather, that you left him a chrysalis and come back to find him a butterfly.

These should be strung in sets upon a thread, care being taken not to pierce the chrysalis, and the strings hung in a cool, darkened room.

To cut it all short, he unwound puttee after puttee of careful wrapping till he reached a chamois-leather chrysalis, which he handled with extreme reverence, and from this he drew something with gentle fingers, and set it on the table-cloth before the goggle-eyed Jackson.