and fro, time after time, to be sure that the cut was direct and
absolute; then, bracing his head against the sand foundation, he began
pushing with his hind legs to move off the selected portion. I thought
to help him, and carefully pushed it with a small reed until it rolled
over on the sand, and he with it, innocuously hoist by his own petard.

Finding himself free on the level sand, he commenced to roll and round
it, kneading the irregularities back and dragging upwards at the same
time with his fore feet, so that in less than a minute after his
liberation he had worked his lump into a close approximation to globular
form, and had started on his voyage; but after a few turns he stopped,
seemed to try the weight of his load, deliberately rolled it back into
its original bed, and then began to excavate another portion, which he
set himself to work into the original ball, which when weighed had been
found wanting. The surface of the latter was thoroughly sanded by its
revolutions, and adhesion was impossible; so he began working the new
material under the coating of sand in so dexterous a way that he quickly
completed the integration, and at the same time restored the globular
form to the whole; then he started anew, to roll it off to its future
depository.

The worst of his mechanical difficulties was overcome; but now began a
series of struggles with Scarabaei unprovided with the objects of
beetling ambition, and whose education seemed to have stopped at the
days when power and possession were words nearer their root and each
other than now,--when to justify piracy you must organize some sort of
government.

I recognized in the deportment of these rovers of the sands another
claim to the reverence of the early ages of human civilization,--another
reason for their canonization by the Egyptians, in whose calendar is
mentioned St. Scarabaeus. For the moment any wandering and pilless
Scarabaeus met the hero of my story he made an examination of the size
and general perfections of his work, going up the side opposite to that
on which its lawful owner had established his motive power; and, as the
bolus was at least a dozen times the size of its owner, he sometimes
took a considerable ramble before he met that important individual. But
they no sooner met than the tug of war began. They fought like Ajax and
Hector for the dead body of Patroclus. They clenched, wrestled,
struggled, pushed, until the stronger got uppermost,