e larger is the
tribute demanded of him. Wholesale agriculture and vegetable abundance
favour our rival the insect.

This is the immanent law. Nature, with an equal zeal, offers her mighty
breast to all her nurslings alike; to those who live by the goods of
others no less than to the producers. For us, who plough, sow, and reap,
and weary ourselves with labour, she ripens the wheat; she ripens it
also for the little Calender-beetle, which, although exempted from the
labour of the fields, enters our granaries none the less, and there,
with its pointed beak, nibbles our wheat, grain by grain, to the husk.

For us, who dig, weed, and water, bent with fatigue and burned by the
sun, she swells the pods of the pea; she swells them also for the
weevil, which does no gardener's work, yet takes its share of the
harvest at its own hour, when the earth is joyful with the new life of
spring.

Let us follow the manoeuvres of this insect which takes its tithe of
the green pea. I, a benevolent ratepayer, will allow it to take its
dues; it is precisely to benefit it that I have sown a few rows of the
beloved plant in a corner of my garden. Without other invitation on my
part than this modest expenditure of seed-peas it arrives punctually
during the month of May. It has learned that this stony soil, rebellious
to the culture of the kitchen-gardener, is bearing peas for the first
time. In all haste therefore it has hurried, an agent of the
entomological revenue system, to demand its dues.

Whence does it come? It is impossible to say precisely. It has come from
some shelter, somewhere, in which it has passed the winter in a state of
torpor. The plane-tree, which sheds its rind during the heats of the
summer, furnishes an excellent refuge for homeless insects under its
partly detached sheets of bark.

I have often found our weevil in such a winter refuge. Sheltered under
the dead covering of the plane, or otherwise protected while the winter
lasts, it awakens from its torpor at the first touch of a kindly sun.
The almanack of the instincts has aroused it; it knows as well as the
gardener when the pea-vines are in flower, and seeks its favourite
plant, journeying thither from every side, running with quick, short
steps, or nimbly flying.

A small head, a fine snout, a costume of ashen grey sprinkled with
brown, flattened wing-covers, a dumpy, compact body, with two large
black dots on the rear segment--such is the summary portrait o