or "toadstools" that affect the conifers; especially the
delicious Lactaris, which turns green if the points are rubbed and drips
blood if broken. In the warm days of autumn this is the favourite
promenade of the members of my household, being distant enough to
exercise their young legs, but near enough not to fatigue them.

There one finds and sees all manner of things: old magpies' nests, great
bundles of twigs; jays, wrangling after filling their crops with the
acorns of the neighbouring oaks; rabbits, whose little white upturned
scuts go bobbing away through the rosemary bushes; dung-beetles, which
are storing food for the winter and throwing up their rubbish on the
threshold of their burrows. And then the fine sand, soft to the touch,
easily tunnelled, easily excavated or built into tiny huts which we
thatch with moss and surmount with the end of a reed for a chimney; and
the delicious meal of apples, and the sound of the aeolian harps which
softly whisper among the boughs of the pines!

For the children it is a real paradise, where they can receive the
reward of well-learned lessons. The grown-ups also can share in the
enjoyment. As for myself, for long years I have watched two insects
which are found there without getting to the bottom of their domestic
secrets. One is the _Minotaurus typhaeus_, whose male carries on his
corselet three spines which point forward. The old writers called him
the Phalangist, on account of his armour, which is comparable to the
three ranks of lances of the Macedonian phalanx.

This is a robust creature, heedless of the winter. All during the cold
season, whenever the weather relents a little, it issues discreetly from
its lodging, at nightfall, and gathers, in the immediate neighbourhood
of its dwelling, a few fragments of sheep-dung and ancient olives which
the summer suns have dried. It stacks them in a row at the end of its
burrow, closes the door, and consumes them. When the food is broken up
and exhausted of its meagre juices it returns to the surface and renews
its store. Thus the winter passes, famine being unknown unless the
weather is exceptionally hard.

The second insect which I have observed for so long among the pines is
the Bolboceras. Its burrows, scattered here and there, higgledy-piggledy
with those of the Minotaur, are easy to recognise. The burrow of the
Phalangist is surmounted by a voluminous rubbish-dump, the materials of
which are piled in the form of a cyli