Fortune favours the patient, and rewards my assiduity Round the little capsule changes of infinite delicacy have prepared the line of least resistance.  The end of the egg, pushed by the head of the inmate, becomes detached, rises, and falls aside like the top of a tiny phial.  The Cricket issues like a Jack-in-the-box.

When the Cricket has departed the shell remains distended, smooth, intact, of the purest white, with the circular lid hanging to the mouth of the door of exit.  The egg of the bird breaks clumsily under the blows of a wart-like excrescence which is formed expressly upon the beak of the unborn bird; the egg of the Cricket, of a far superior structure, opens like an ivory casket.  The pressure of the inmate’s head is sufficient to work the hinge.

The moment he is deprived of his white tunic, the young Cricket, pale all over, almost white, begins to struggle against the overlying soil.  He strikes it with his mandibles; he sweeps it aside, kicking it backwards and downwards; and being of a powdery quality, which offers no particular resistance, he soon arrives at the surface, and henceforth knows the joys of the sun, and the perils of intercourse with the living; a tiny, feeble creature, little larger than a flea.  His colour deepens.  In twenty-four hours he assumes a splendid ebony black which rivals that of the adult insect.  Of his original pallor he retains only a white girdle which encircles the thorax and reminds one of the leading-string of an infant.

Very much on the alert, he sounds his surroundings with his long vibrating antennae; he toddles and leaps along with a vigour which his future obesity will no longer permit.

This is the age of stomach troubles.  What are we to give him to eat?  I do not know.  I offer him adult diet—­the tender leaves of a lettuce.  He disdains to bite it; or perhaps his bites escape me, so tiny would they be.

In a few days, what with my ten households, I see myself loaded with family cares.  What shall I do with my five or six thousand Crickets, an attractive flock, to be sure, but one I cannot bring up in my ignorance of the treatment required?  I will give you liberty, gentle creatures!  I will confide you to the sovereign nurse and schoolmistress, Nature!

It is done.  Here and there about my orchard, in the most favourable localities, I loose my legions.  What a concert I shall have before my door next year if all goes well!  But no!  There will probably be silence, for the terrible extermination will follow which corresponds with the fertility of the mother.  A few couples only may survive:  that is the most we can hope.

The first to come to the living feast and the most eager at the slaughter are the little grey lizard and the ant.  I am afraid this latter, hateful filibuster that it is, will not leave me a single Cricket in my garden.  It falls upon the tiny Crickets, eviscerates them, and devours them with frantic greed.