This manner of seeing country is within my means, always excepting the post-chaise, which is too difficult to drive through the bushes. I go the circuit of my enclosure over and over again, a hundred times, by short stages; I stop here and I stop there; patiently, I put questions and, at long intervals, I receive some scrap of a reply.
The smallest insect village has become familiar to me: I know each fruit-branch where the Praying Mantis4 perches; each bush where the pale Italian Cricket5 strums amid the calmness of the summer nights; each downy plant scraped by the Anthidium, that maker of cotton bags; each cluster of lilac worked by the Megachile, the Leaf-cutter.
4 Cf. The Life of the Grasshopper: chaps. vi. to ix.—Translator's Note.
5 Cf. idem: chap. xvi.—Translator's Note.
If cruising among the nooks and corners of the garden do not suffice, a longer voyage shows ample profit. I double the cape of the neighbouring hedges and, at a few hundred yards, enter into relations with the Sacred Beetle,6 the Capricorn, the Geotrupes,7 the Copris,8 the Decticus,9 the Cricket,10 the Green Grasshopper,11 in short, with a host of tribes the telling of whose story would exhaust a lifetime. Certainly, I have enough and even too much to do with my near neighbours, without leaving home to rove in distant lands.
6 Cf. The Sacred Beetle and Others, by J. Henri Fabre, translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos: chaps i. to vi.—Translator's Note.
7 Cf. idem: chaps. xii. to xiv.—Translator's Note.
8 Cf. idem: chaps. ix. and xvi.—Translator's Note.
9 Cf. The Life of the Grasshopper: chaps. xi. to xiii.—Translator's Note.