Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/59



ed that plants can be destroyed. It is during pupa life, while living in their cavernous homes near the roots of trees, that cicadas are most likely to do mischief.

In six weeks the young are hatched. They are about a sixteenth of an inch long, tiny miniatures of a pupa-shell. The first pair of their six legs are relatively large, shaped somewhat like lobsters' claws, and armed with strong spines beneath. They have shoulder-knots, the future wing buds, and attached to the mouth and carried under the breast is a long beak. These wee creaturelings fling themselves from their cradles "on the tree top," and fall to the ground as lightly as thistle-down. At once they begin to burrow, their strong forelegs enabling them to dig rapidly. Down they go until they have reached a roost upon some branching rootlet. Clearing away a little cell around the root, they fasten their sharp beaks into the tender bark and pump out the sap, which becomes for them both meat and drink. There they stay and thus they live until their long pupilage of seventeen years is ended.

We may perhaps venture to guess that during this period they burrow back and forth amid the maze of roots, and drink long and deep from the streams of savory sap which they tap with their beaks. They thrive and grow. They take no end of sleep. Perhaps they greet one another, and pass who knows what communications, in the mysterious language of the mute children of the insect world.

When Nature gives the signal, an irresistible impulse seizes the entire host. They leave their caverns and, guided by an unerring instinct, mount upward. When the spring air blows softly, out they come. Soon the air is filled with the flutter of their wings, and the rolling of their drums is heard among the trees. In six weeks they are gone, an extinguished nation, and silence falls upon the groves.