“I knew how to ripen medlars on straw,” said Emile, “but I should have been puzzled to tell how to ripen a branch of a tree. What curious creatures those are, with their clever ways of doing things! One can do one thing and another can do another, and it is always ingenious and never the same.” “It is vexatious that all too often the insect’s labors involve harm and loss to us. When a fruit-tree has been operated on by the conical weevil you can see, in the month of May, the tips of the shoots hanging withered and blackened, after which they dry up and fall.” “Do the larvæ stay in the tips of the fallen branches?” asked Jules. “What would they do there? Food would fail them, and so they bury themselves in the ground to finish their growth and pass the winter there snugly and safely. In the spring their metamorphosis takes place.” “Then to guard against insect ravages for the next year,” said Louis, “the withered shoots that hang from the trees should be collected and burned while the larvæ are still there.” “Yes, that is the best thing to do.” CHAPTER XLIII NUT-WEEVILS AND FLOWER-WEEVILS “Ha, you rascal, I’ve caught you at it now, eating my hazelnuts!” cried Louis one day on seeing a weevil piercing with its long beak a still tender young nut. “I’ve caught you at it. But first I’ll learn all about you, and then we’ll have a reckoning.” The weevil was placed in a paper cornucopia together with some pierced hazelnuts, and in his first spare moment Louis hastened to Uncle Paul’s house, his cheeks flushed with excitement. Little Louis was very fond of hazelnuts, and to catch in the very act the insect that attacks them was a very serious matter, to his thinking. In the evening Uncle Paul had his usual audience around him to listen to his account of the hazelnut-weevil. “Here is the little insect Louis has caught,” he began. “Look at its beak a moment.” “What a nose!” exclaimed Emile. “Oh, what a nose! It is as slender as a hair and very long and turned back at the end.” “Doesn’t it look as if it were smoking a long pipe, as I said the other day?” asked Louis. “See, Uncle,” Emile pointed out, “how close together its eyes are; they almost touch each other, and the insect seems to be squinting. How funny it is, with its nose like a pipe-stem and its squinting eyes!” “Where is its mouth?” asked Jules. “At the very end of what Emile calls its long nose,” his uncle replied. “How does it manage to eat? Food must have a hard time getting through that stem not so big around as a thread.” “Yes, how does it manage to eat?” Emile chimed in. “I should be in a terrible fix if I had to take my food through a straw as long as myself.”