Before it is altogether freed from the soil the struggler halts for a moment, to recover from the effects of the journey. Then, with renewed strength, it makes a last effort: it swells the protrusion at the back of its head as [[136]]far as it will go, and bursts the sheath that has protected it so far. The creature throws off its overall.
Here, then, is the Decticus in his youthful shape, quite pale still, but darker the next day, and a regular blackamoor compared with the full-grown insect. As a prelude to the ivory face of his riper age he wears a narrow white stripe under his hinder thighs.
Little Decticus, hatched before my eyes, life opens for you very harshly! Many of your relatives must die of exhaustion before winning their freedom. In my tubes I see numbers who, being stopped by a grain of sand, give up the struggle half-way and become furred with a sort of silky fluff. Mildew soon absorbs their poor little remains. And when carried out without my help, their journey to the surface must be even more dangerous, for the soil out of doors is coarse and baked by the sun.
The little white-striped nigger nibbles at the lettuce-leaf I give him, and leaps about gaily in the cage where I have housed him. I could easily rear him, but he would not teach me much more. So I restore him to liberty. In return for what he has taught me I give him the grass and the Locusts in the garden.
For he taught me that Grasshoppers, in order to leave the ground where the eggs are laid, wear a temporary form which keeps those too cumbrous parts, the [[137]]long legs and antennæ, swathed together in a sheath. He taught me, too, that this mummy-like creature, fit only to lengthen and shorten itself a little, has for its means of travelling a hernia in the neck, a throbbing blister—an original piece of mechanism which, when I first observed the Decticus, I had never seen used as an aid to progression. [[138]]