gone tomorrow, for I know
nothing of their settlements. To keep a watch on them, one by one,
in the blazing heat, is very painful and very unfruitful, as the
swift-winged insect has a habit of disappearing one knows not whither
just when a prospect of capturing its secret begins to offer. I have
wasted many a patient hour at this pursuit, without the least result.

There might be some chance of success with Anthrax flies whose home was
known to us beforehand, especially if insects of the same species
formed a pretty numerous colony. The inquiries begun with one would
be continued with a second and with more, until a complete verdict was
forthcoming. Now, in the course of my long entomological career, I have
met with but two species of Anthrax that fulfilled this condition and
were to be found regularly: one at Carpentras; the other at Serignan.
The first, Anthrax sinuata, FALLEN, lives in the cocoons of Osmia
tricornis, who herself builds her nest in the old galleries of the
hairy-footed Anthophora; the second, Anthrax trifasciata, MEIGEN,
exploits the Chalicodoma of the Sheds. I will consult both.

Once more, here am I, somewhat late in life, at Carpentras, whose rude
Gallic name sets the fool smiling and the scholar thinking. Dear little
town where I spent my twentieth year and left the first bits of my
fleece upon life's bushes, my visit of today is a pilgrimage; I have
come to lay my eyes once more upon the place which saw the birth of the
liveliest impressions of my early days. I bow, in passing, to the old
college where I tried my prentice hand as a teacher. Its appearance is
unchanged; it still looks like a penitentiary. Those were the views of
our mediaeval educational system. To the gaiety and activity of boyhood,
which were considered unwholesome, it applied the remedy of narrowness,
melancholy and gloom. Its houses of instruction were, above all, houses
of correction. The freshness of Virgil was interpreted in the stifling
atmosphere of a prison. I catch a glimpse of a yard between four high
walls, a sort of bear pit, where the scholars fought for room for their
games under the spreading branches of a plane tree. All around were
cells that looked like horse boxes, without light or air; those were the
classrooms. I speak in the past tense, for doubtless the present day has
seen the last of this academic destitution.

Here is the tobacco shop where, on Wednesday evening, coming out of the
college, I would buy