Quite contrary to my original intention, my specimen of _Musca domestica_, which I had captured at random to serve as my model in the present chapter, has suggested that I begin with a Q, and after some expressive criticism on the matter I have at last consented to humor him, especially as he proved otherwise a most unique and accommodating individual. Being in need of a good, healthy, toe-twisting, neck-twirling specimen to sit for his portrait in an illustration for a forthcoming article on the paper wasp, I cast my eye about my easel. There, right at my elbow, still plying his never-ending toilet, I beheld him--strange coincidence, was it not? A sweep of my hand, and I have him! And in a moment more, with the tips of his toes besmeared with glue, he is a secure prisoner on the white paper before me. The victim having served his purpose, I was preparing to drench him with a few drops of water to dissolve his bonds and set him free, when I happened to observe a feature which had before escaped my notice. The glue had chanced to secure one of its feet well beneath its body, and now that it was released I discovered that I had made considerably more of a catch with that sweep of my hand than I had imagined. Attached to one of the terminal joints of the front leg there appeared a tiny red object, which I instantly recognized as a curious tag which I had seen before, and which forms an occasional lively episode in the life not only of house-flies but other flies as well. And what a queer-shaped tag it is, to be sure! It is not easy to describe its dimensions on account of its changeable proportions--now spreading out its two long appendages, now contracting into an oblong or rounded outline, or sprawled out in the shape of a curious letter T, and now thrown about in such a helter-skelter fashion by the antics of the fly that nothing but the fact of its red color is discernible. But when we bring our magnifying-glass to bear upon it, its diminutive size is forgotten, while its shape is now perfectly familiar to us all--a lobster! a veritable live young lobster, and what is even more strange, a live boiled lobster at that! No, it must be a crab lobster, for was ever the liveliest lobster in its greenest stages half so spry as this warlike midge, whose free, upraised, open claws threaten to nip our fingers off as we hold the lens above him. But nag and prod him as we will, no provocation will induce him to loosen his grip on his means of transport.