Once a cicada mother made with her ovipositor a little slit or cavity in an oak twig, and in this slit placed in very neat order two rows of eggs. Six weeks later there hatched from one of these eggs a pale, lively little creature, that to the naked eye looked like a tiny white ant. If, however, we could have examined him through a lens we should have found him very different from an ant; for his two front legs were shaped somewhat like lobsters' big claws, and instead of jaws like an ant, he had simply a long beak that was hollow like a tube. After he came out of his egg he ran about the tree and seemed interested for a time in everything he saw. Then, suddenly, he went to the side of a limb and deliberately fell off. To his little eyes the ground below was invisible; so our small cicada showed great faith when he practically jumped off the edge of his world into space. He was such a speck of a creature that the breeze took him and lifted him gently down, as if he were the petal of a flower; and he alighted on the earth unhurt and probably much delighted with his sail through the air. At once he commenced hunting for some little crevice in the earth; and when he found it he went to the bottom of it and with his shovel-like fore-feet began digging downward. I wonder if he stopped to give a last look at sky, sunshine, and the beautiful green world before he bade them good-bye for seventeen long years! If so, he did it hurriedly, for he was intent upon reaching something to eat. This he finally found a short distance below the surface of the ground, in the shape of a juicy rootlet of the great tree above. Into this he inserted his beak and began to take the sap as we take lemonade through a straw. He made a little cell around himself and then he found existence quite blissful. He ate very little and grew very slowly, and there was no perceptible change in him for about a year; then he shed his skin for the first time, and thus, insect-wise, grew larger. After a time he dug another cell near another rootlet deeper in the ground; but he never exerted himself more than was necessary to obtain the little food that he needed. This idle life he found entirely satisfactory, and the days grew into months and the months into years. Only six times in the seventeen years did our hermit change his clothes, and this was each time a necessity, since they had become too small. Judging from what the Senior Naturalist told me, I think this is six times more than a Thibetan hermit changes his clothes in the same length of time.