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of the process, like a man to whom the post has brought too many letters; but there was one--the last I opened--the living active contents of which served to remind me that some insects are unable to make a cylinder for themselves, having neither gum nor web to fasten it with, and yet they will always find one made by others to shelter themselves in. Here were no fewer than six unbeautiful creatures, brothers and sisters, hatched from eggs on which their parent earwig sat incubating just like an eagle or dove or swallow, or, better still, like a pelican; for in the end did she not give of her own life-fluid to nourish her children? Unbeautiful, yet not without a glory superior to that of the Purple Emperor, and the angelic blue Morpho, and the broad-winged Ornithoptera, that caused an illustrious traveller to swoon with joy at the sight of its supreme loveliness. Du Maurier has a drawing of a little girl in a garden gazing at two earwigs racing along a stem. "I suppose," she remarks interrogatively to her mamma, "that these are Mr. and Mrs. Earwig?" and on being answered affirmatively, exclaims, "What could they have seen in each other?" What they saw was blue
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blood, or something in insectology corresponding to it. The earwig's lustre is that of antiquity. He existed on earth before colour came in; and colour is old, although not so old as Nature's unconscious aestheticism which, in the organic world, is first expressed in beauty of form. It is long since the great May flies, large as swifts, had their aerial cloudy dances over the vast everglades and ancient forests of ferns; and when, on some dark night, a brilliant Will-o'-the-wisp rose and floated above the feathery foliage, drawn in myriads to its light, they revolved about it in an immense mystical wheel, misty-white, glistening, and touched with prismatic colour. Floating fire and wheel were visible only to the stars, and the wakeful eyes of giant scaly monsters lying quiescent in the black waters below; but they were very beautiful nevertheless. The modest earwig was old on the earth even then; he dates back to the time, immeasurably remote, when scorpions possessed the earth, and taught him to frighten his enemies with a stingless tail--that curious antique little tail which has not yet forgot its cunning.
Greater than all these inhabitants of the garden, ancient or modern by reason of their
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numbers, which is the sign of predominance, are the small wingless people that have colonies on every green stem and under every green leaf.