alluded to indicated to me the location of her
den by pausing suggestively in front of a tiny cairn. In this instance a
small flat stone, considerably larger than the tunnel, had been laid
over the opening, and the others piled upon it. On two occasions I have
surprised this same species of wasp industriously engaged in the
selection of a suitable flat foundation-stone with which to cover her
burrow: her widely extended slender jaws enable her to grasp a pebble
nearly a third of an inch in width.

In my opening vignette I have indicated two other door-step neighbors
which bore my industrious wasps company in their arena of one square
yard. To the left, surrounding a grass stem, will be seen an object
which is unpleasantly familiar to most country folks--that salivary mass
variously known by the libellous names of "snake-spit," "cow-spit,"
"cuckoo-spit," "toad-spit," and "sheep-spit," or the inelegant though
expressive substitute of "gobs." The foam-bath pavilion of the
"spume-bearer," with his glittering, bubbly domicile of suds, is
certainly familiar to most of my readers; but comparatively few, I find,
have cared to investigate the mysterious mass, or to learn the identity
of the proprietor of the foamy lavatory.

The common name of "cow-spit," with the implied indignity to our "rural
divinity," becomes singularly ludicrous when we observe not only the
frequent generous display of the suds samples, thousands upon thousands
in a single small meadow, but the further fact that each mass is so
exactly landed upon the central stalk of grass or other plant--"spitted"
through its centre, as it were. The true expectorator is within, laved
in his own home-made suds. If we care to blow or scrape off the bubbles,
we readily disclose him--- a green speckled bug, about a third of an
inch in length in larger specimens, with prominent black eyes, and
blunt, wedge-shaped body.

[Illustration]

In the appended sketch I have indicated two views of him, back and
profile, creeping upon a grass stalk. A glance at the insect tells the
entomologist just where to place him, as he is plainly allied to the
cicadae, and thus belongs to the order _Hemiptera_, or family of "bugs,"
which implies, among other things, that the insect possesses a "beak for
sucking." To what extent this tiny soaker is possessed of such a beak
may be inferred from the amount of moisture with which he manages to
inundate himself, which has all been withdrawn from th