Then There Were Five by Elizabeth Enright

boy in one day ate nine Thanksgiving dinners. Oliver had to fill the jars first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and the night feeding was the one he liked to forget. This meant that often his pets would be found striding ravenously about in their glass prisons, or trying to push off the mosquito netting in order to widen their frantic search for food.
    â€œOh, for Pete’s sake!” Rush would groan. “The parsley caterpillar’s finished the parsley again. He’s gobbled up a bale already. I suppose I’ll have to get it some more.”
    Or Mona would push open the kitchen door. “Cuffy, have you got a cabbage leaf? The disgusting cabbage caterpillars are all out of their disgusting cabbage.”
    Even Father, upon occasion, was to be seen flickering gloomily about the garden with a flashlight to get “more lilac leaves for the confounded cecropia larva.” After all, he had encouraged this hobby.
    When the caterpillars had eaten several hundred times their own weight in greenstuff they began making cocoons. In each glass jar Oliver had put some earth or a strong twig, depending on whether the creature in question was a burrower or a weaver. Even Cuffy and Mona found themselves interested in the progress of the cocoons: they were so ingenious, beautifully knitted, and in some cases lovely to look at. The monarch caterpillar, for instance, contrived a waxy chrysalis of pale green, flecked with tiny arabesques of gilt. It hung from the twig on a little black silk thread, like the jade earring of a Manchu princess.
    â€œHow lovely!” cried Mona. “Oh, if there were only some way of preserving them. I’d like to have a pale-green dress all buttoned down the front with those.”
    Oliver was outraged, and Rush said, “There’s a woman for you. Always thinking of the beauties of nature in terms of wearing apparel. Can’t see a shiny spider web without wanting to make a snood out of it. Can’t see the Grand Canyon without wanting to dye something to match it. Can’t—”
    â€œOh, Rush, if you could hear how stuffy you sound!” cried Mona. “Pompous and stuffy and about fifty years old. I suppose you’d rather have me quote a poem!”
    â€œWell, you never lost an opportunity yet,” Rush observed. “What’s the matter, didn’t Shakespeare ever write any poetry about cocoons?”
    The nice thing about the monarch chrysalis was that the creature which emerged at the end of two weeks was as beautiful as his case. Orange-red and cream and black, like the petals of a tiger lily, he clung to the twig till his wings dried and widened, and then Oliver took him to the open window and deposited him gently on a leaf. Watching the butterfly fluttering away in the sunshine Oliver could not help feeling a little like God releasing a new soul into the world.
    Cocoons kept turning up in the queerest places. A few caterpillars had inevitably escaped and Cuffy was loud in her protests at finding two little silk hammocks clinging to the living-room baseboard, another stuck to Father’s typewriter, and another jade earring dangling from the dining-room ceiling.
    â€œGives you the creeps,” she grumbled, “to imagine them things prowling around the house like they owned it, and building their nests any old place.”
    â€œCocoons or chrysalises, not nests,” said Oliver firmly, and was grateful that though she grumbled Cuffy did not destroy the cocoons.
    Oliver was having a wonderful summer. He loved it all. Fish, insects, swimming pool, woods, his own bicycle. What more could a boy ask?
    Yet Oliver did have something more. He had a secret world that he entered when he went to bed. A world of which his family had no idea, Cuffy least of all. And it was by no means the world of dreams.
    On the nights when he was not immediately claimed by sleep, and when he was reasonably sure of not being discovered, Oliver