warm in a heap, always
seeking, always snuffling with their pointed mouths. In those tumultuous
crowds, mutual scratches would be inevitable if the worms, like the
other flesh eaters, possessed mandibles, jaws, clippers adapted for
cutting, tearing and chopping; and those scratches, poisoned by the
dreadful gruel lapping them, would all be fatal.

How are the worms protected in their horrible work yard? They do not
eat: they drink their fill; by means of a pepsin which they disgorge,
they first turn their foodstuffs into soup; they practice a strange and
exceptional art of feeding, wherein those dangerous carving implements,
the scalpels with their dissecting room perils, are superfluous. Here
ends, for the present, the little that I know or suspect of the maggot,
the sanitary inspector in the service of the public health.

CHAPTER XVII. RECOLLECTIONS OF CHILDHOOD

Almost as much as insects and birds--the former so dear to the child,
who loves to rear his cockchafers and rose beetles on a bed of hawthorn
in a box pierced with holes; the latter an irresistible temptation, with
their nests and their eggs and their little ones opening tiny yellow
beaks--the mushroom early won my heart with its varied shapes and
colors. I can still see myself as an innocent small boy sporting my
first braces and beginning to know my way through the cabalistic mazes
of my reading book, I see myself in ecstasy before the first bird's nest
found and the first mushroom gathered. Let us relate these grave events.
Old age loves to meditate the past.

O happy days when curiosity awakens and frees us from the limbo of
unconsciousness, your distant memory makes me live my best years over
again. Disturbed at its siesta by some wayfarer, the partridge's young
brood hastily disperses. Each pretty little ball of down scurries off
and disappears in the brushwood; but, when quiet is restored, at the
first summoning note they all return under the mother's wing. Even so,
recalled by memory, do my recollections of childhood return, those other
fledglings which have lost so many of their feathers on the brambles of
life. Some, which have hardly come out of the bushes, have aching heads
and tottering steps; some are missing, stifled in some dark corner of
the thicket; some remain in their full freshness. Now of those which
have escaped the clutches of time the liveliest are the first-born. For
them the soft wax of childish memory has been converted in