raised him, loosened his neckcloth--

"Fainted!" said the ladies.

"Drunk!" said the gentlemen.

He was _dead!_

SINGULAR PROCEEDINGS OF THE SAND WASP. (FROM HOWITT'S COUNTRY YEAR-BOOK.)

In all my observations of the habits of living things, I have never seen
any thing more curious than the doings of one species of these
ammophilae--lovers of sand. I have watched them day after day, and hour
after hour, in my garden, and also on the sandy banks on the wastes about
Esher, in Surrey, and always with unabated wonder. They are about an inch
long, with orange-colored bodies, and black heads and wings. They are
slender and most active. You see them on the warm borders of your garden,
or on warm, dry banks, in summer, when the sun shines hotly. They are
incessantly and most actively hunting about. They are in pursuit of a
particular gray spider with a large abdomen. For these they pursue their
chase with a fiery quickness and avidity. The spiders are on the watch to
seize flies; but here we have the tables turned, and these are flies on
the watch to discover and kill the spiders. These singular insects seem
all velocity and fire. They come flying at a most rapid rate, light down
on the dry soil, and commence an active search. The spiders lie under the
leaves of plants, and in little dens under the dry little clods. Into all
these places the sand-wasp pops his head. He bustles along here and there,
flirting his wings, and his whole body all life and fire. And now he moves
off to a distance, hunts about there, then back to his first place, beats
the old ground carefully over, as a pointer beats a field. He searches
carefully round every little knob of earth, and pops his head into every
crevice. Ever and anon, he crouches close among the little clods as a
tiger would crouch for his prey. He seems to be listening, or smelling
down into the earth, as if to discover his prey by every sense which he
possesses, He goes round every stalk, and descends into every hollow about
them. When he finds the spider, he dispatches him in a moment, and seizing
him by the centre of his chest, commences dragging him off backward.

He conveys his prey to a place of safety. Frequently he carries it up some
inches into a plant, and lodges it among the green leaves. Seeing him do
this, I poked his spider down with a stick after he had left it; but he
speedily returned, and finding it fallen down, he immediately carried it
up again to t