Sitting secure in a crotch of the chestnut tree of my choice, beating the chestnuts from the half-open burs with a birch pole and listening to their patter on the dry leaves far beneath, I was conscious after a time of a little gritting squeak,--a squeak that sounded much like a small, unoiled joint that was very mad about it. It might have been two tree limbs rubbing together, only that it was too personal. Creaking limbs are always mournful in tone; this squeak was full of impotent, nervous rage.
It was difficult to locate exactly, and I had thinned out the chestnuts pretty well and was about to climb down before I discovered what it was that made it. Hanging head down from a twig that protruded from the under side of a large limb was a great bat, swinging from one hind toe. His furry, gray body was half loosely wrapped in his wings, that looked like wrinkled folds of dark sheet rubber. His ugly little face was all screwed up with rage and his sputtering squeaks were a ludicrous exposition of impotent fury.
Every blow of my pole on the tree had jarred him. In his darkness of our daytime he could not see what it was that troubled him, nor could he venture to fly away from it lest he rush into worse danger. So he simply hung on and protested in all the voice and vocabulary that he had, and when I plucked him carefully by that hind claw and wrapped him in a handkerchief and stowed him in the side pocket of my coat, he continued to mutter bat profanity.
You will find in the velvety heart of a chestnut bur usually three nuts, sometimes but one of these plump, and with a ripened kernel within the shell. The two others in this case will be but flat walls of shell with no kernel. Sometimes two of the three are meaty, and occasionally all three, only the fat ones being fertile seeds. Poking about among the brown leaves on the ground beneath the tree for these, now and then pricking my fingers in separating a particularly fat one from the bur, that had come down with it, I found another unfamiliar denizen of the chestnut tree that my clubbing had dislodged.
This was the larva of _Telia polyphemus_, the _polyphemus_ moth. The moth himself is a beautiful creature with a six-inch spread of pinky-brown wings with a wonderful eye-spot of peacock-blue, dark-maroon, and yellow-white in the after wing. The form that I had picked up was a fat worm, nearly four inches long and fully an inch in diameter, of a clear, transparent, yellowish-green texture ornamented on the sides by raised lines of a silvery white,--a strikingly beautiful object so far as coloring is concerned.