First of these was the sandy plateau of the Angles, where every spring, in
the sunlit pastures so beloved of the sheep, the Scarabaeus sacer, with his
incurved feet and clumsy legs, commences to roll his everlasting pellet,
"to the ancients the image of the world." His history, since the time of
the Pharaohs, had been nothing but a tissue of legends; but stripping it of
the embroidery of fiction, and referring it to the facts of nature, Fabre
demonstrated that the true story is even more marvellous than all the tales
of ancient Egypt. He narrated its actual life, the object of its task, and
its comical and exhilarating performances. But such is the subtlety of
these delicate and difficult researches that nearly forty years were
required to complete the study of its habits and to solve the mystery of
its cradle. (4/14.)

On the right bank of the Rhône, facing the embouchure of the Durance, is a
small wood of oak-trees, the wood of Des Issarts. This again, for many
reasons, was one of his favourite spots. There, "lying flat on the ground,
his head in the shadow of some rabbit's burrow," or sheltered from the sun
by a great umbrella, "while the blue-winged locusts frisked for joy," he
would follow the rapid and sibilant flight of the elegant Bembex, carrying
their daily ration of diptera to her larvae, at the bottom of her burrow,
deep in the fine sand." (4/15.)

He did not always go thither alone: sometimes, on Sundays, he would take
his pupils with him, to spend a morning in the fields, "at the ineffable
festival of the awakening of life in the spring." (4/16.)

Those most dear to him, those who in the subsequent years have remained the
object of a special affection, were Devillario, Bordone, and Vayssières
(4/17.), "young people with warm hearts and smiling imaginations,