mazons. She has made under a shelf
a mud nest of three long cells, and filled them one 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, certain