CECIL B. DEMILLE told this wonderful experience: "Many years ago I was commissioned by David Belasco to write a play, ’The Return of Peter Grimm.’ The play was being written for David Warfield, and the story hinged upon the continuation of life after death.
"I got the inspiration for that story from a water beetle. I was up on a lake in the Maine woods. The Canoe was drifting. I was reading-resting-searching for an idea. I looked down in the water, for my little craft had drifted to where the lake was only about four inches deep. There in a world of mud and wet, were water beetles. One crawled up on the gunwale, stuck the talons on his legs into the woodwork, and died.
"I let it alone and turned to my reading. The sun was hot. In about three hours I looked at my water beetle again. He was parched. His back was cracking open. I watched and out of the back of that dead beetle I saw crawling a new form--a moist head--then wings. A most beautiful dragonfly. It scintillated all the colors of the rainbow.
"As I sat watching, it flew farther in a second than the water beetle had crawled in days. It hovered above the surface, just a few inches from the water beetles beneath. They did not know it was there.
"I took my fingertip and moved the shriveled water beetle husk from the canoe’s gunwale. It fell back into the lake and sank down to the mud-covered bottom. The other water beetles crawled awkwardly to see what it was. It was a dead body. They backed away from it.
"If God does that for a water beetle, don’t you believe He will do it for me?"