become sick and
die, and there will be an end of the silkworm business from that
quarter-ounce of eggs. They must have plenty of room on their table as
well as in their skins. At first a tray or table two feet long and a
little more than one foot wide will be large enough; but when they are
full-grown, they will need about eighty square feet of table or
shelves. At spinning time, even this will not be enough.

After the worms have shed their skins four times and then eaten as
much as they possibly can for eight or ten days, they begin to feel
as if they had had enough. They now eat very little and really become
smaller. They are restless and wander about. Now and then they throw
out threads of silk as fine as a spider's web. They know exactly what
they want; each little worm wants to make a cocoon, and all they ask
of you is to give them the right sort of place to make it in. When
they live out of doors in freedom, they fasten their cocoons to twigs;
and if you wish to give them what they like best, get plenty of dry
twigs and weave them together in arches standing over the shelves.
Pretty soon you will see one worm after another climb up the twigs and
select a place for its cocoon. Before long it throws out threads from
its spinneret, a tiny opening near the mouth, and makes a kind of net
to support the cocoon which it is about to weave.

The silkworm may have seemed greedy, but he did not eat one leaf too
much for the task that lies before him. There is nothing lazy about
him; and now he works with all his might, making his cocoon. He begins
at the outside and shapes it like a particularly plump peanut of a
clear, pale yellow. The silk is stiffened with a sort of gum as it
comes out of the spinneret. The busy little worm works away, laying
its threads in place in the form of a figure eight. For some time the
cocoon is so thin that one can watch him. It is calculated that his
tiny head makes sixty-nine movements every minute.

The covering grows thicker and the room for the silkworm grows
smaller. After about seventy-two hours, put your ear to the cocoon,
and if all is quiet within, it is completed and the worm is shut up
within it. Strange things happen to him while he sleeps in the quiet
of his silken bed, for he becomes a dry brown chrysalis without head
or feet. Then other things even more marvelous come to pass, for in
about three weeks the little creature pushes the threads apart at one
end of the cocoon and