by one with small spiders, and the precious egg which, when hatched, is to feed on them.  One hundred and eight spiders we have counted in a single nest like this; and the wasp, much of the same shape as the Jack Spaniard, but smaller, works, unlike him, alone, or at least only with her husband’s help.  The long mud nest is built upright, often in the angle of a doorpost or panel; and always added to, and entered from, below.  With a joyful hum she flies back to it all day long with her pellets of mud, and spreads them out with her mouth into pointed arches, one laid on the other, making one side of the arch out of each pellet, and singing low but cheerily over her work.  As she works downward, she parts off the tube of the nest with horizontal floors of a finer and harder mud, and inside each storey places some five spiders, and among them the precious egg, or eggs, which is to feed on them when hatched.  If we open the uppermost chamber, we shall find every vestige of the spiders gone, and the cavity filled (and, strange to say, exactly filled) by a brown-coated wasp-pupa, enveloped in a fine silken shroud.  In the chamber below, perhaps, we shall find the grub full-grown, and finishing his last spicier; and so on, down six or eight storeys, till the lowest holds nothing but spiders, packed close, but not yet sealed up.  These spiders, be it remembered, are not dead.  By some strange craft, the wasp knows exactly where to pierce them with her sting, so as to stupefy, but not to kill, just as the sand-wasps of our banks at home stupefy the large weevils which they store in their burrows as food for their grubs.

There are wasps too, here, who make pretty little jar-shaped nests, round, with a neatly lined round lip.  Paper-nests, too, more like those of our tree-wasps at home, hang from the trees in the woods.  Ants’ nests, too, hang sometimes from the stronger boughs, looking like huge hard lumps of clay.  And, once at least, we have found silken nests of butterflies or moths, containing many chrysalids each.  Meanwhile, dismiss from your mind the stories of insect plagues.  If good care is taken to close the mosquito curtains at night, the flies about the house are not nearly as troublesome as we have often found the midges in Scotland.  As for snakes, we have seen none; centipedes are, certainly, apt to get into the bath, but can be fished out dead, and thrown to the chickens.  The wasps and bees do not sting, or in any wise interfere with our comfort, save by building on the books.  The only ants who come into the house are the minute, harmless, and most useful ‘crazy ants,’ who run up and down wildly all day, till they find some eatable thing, an atom of bread or a disabled cockroach, of which last, by the by, we have seen hardly any here.  They then prove themselves in their sound senses by uniting to carry off their prey, some pulling, some pushing, with a steady combination