exhausting, the impossibility of knowing which points to attack would
undoubtedly have discouraged me before the problem had advanced a step
farther. Studies such as these call for home leisure and application, for
residence in a country village. You are then familiar with every spot in
your own grounds and the surrounding country and you can go to work with
certainty.

Twenty-three years have passed; and here I am at Serignan, where I have
become a peasant, working by turns on my writing-pad and my cabbage-patch.
On the 14th of August, 1880, Favier (An ex-soldier who acted as the
author's gardener and factotum.--Translator's Note.) clears away a heap of
mould consisting of vegetable refuse and of leaves stacked in a corner
against the wall of the paddock. This clearance is considered necessary
because Bull, when the lovers' moon arrives, uses this hillock to climb to
the top of the wall and thence to repair to the canine wedding the news of
which is brought to him by the effluvia borne upon the air. His pilgrimage
fulfilled, he returns, with a discomfited look and a slit ear, but always
ready, once he has had his feed, to repeat the escapade. To put an end to
this licentious behaviour, which has cost him so many gaping wounds, we
decided to remove the heap of soil which serves him as a ladder of escape.

Favier calls me while in the midst of his labours with the spade and
barrow:

"Here's a find, sir, a great find! Come and look."

I hasten to the spot. The find is a magnificent one indeed and of a nature
to fill me with delight, awakening all my old recollections of the Bois des
Issards. Any number of females of the Two-banded Scolia, disturbed at their
work, are emerging here and there from the depth of the soil. The cocoons