Fortune has her entomological caprices; you run after her and do not come up with her; you forget her, and lo, here she is tapping at your door! How many useless excursions, how many fruitless plans, you made to try to see Sphex occitanica sacrifice her victim! Twenty years go by; these pages are already in the printer’s hands, when, in the first days of this month (August 8, 1878), my son Emile darts into my study. “Quick! quick!” he cries, “a Sphex is dragging along her prey under the plane trees, before the door of the court!” Emile, initiated into the affair by what I had told him, and, better still, by like facts seen in our out-of-door life, was quite right. I hurried away, and saw a splendid S. occitanica dragging a paralysed ephippiger by the antennæ. She moved toward the poultry yard, seemingly desirous of scaling the wall, to make her burrow under some roof tile. Some years before I had seen a similar Sphex accomplish the ascent with her game, and choose her domicile under the arch of an ill-joined tile. Perhaps this new one was descended from her whose difficult ascent I have chronicled. A like feat is probably about to be repeated, and this time before numerous witnesses, for all the household working under the shade of the plane trees formed a circle round the Sphex. They wonder at the audacious tameness of the insect, noways disturbed by the gallery of interested spectators. All are struck by her proud and robust bearing, as, with raised head and the victim’s antennæ well grasped by her mandibles, she drags after her the enormous burden. I alone among the spectators feel some regret. “Ah, had I but some live ephippigers!” I could not help saying, without the least hope of seeing my wish realised. “Live ephippigers!” replied Emile; “why, I have some quite fresh, caught this morning.” Four steps at a time he flew upstairs to his little study, where barricades of dictionaries enclosed a park wherein was brought up a fine caterpillar of Sphinx euphorbiæ. He brought back three ephippigers as good as heart could wish—two females and one male. How came these insects at hand just at the right moment for an experiment vainly tried twenty years before? This is another story. A southern shrike had nested on one of the tall plane trees in the avenue. Some days before the Mistral, the rude wind of our parts, had blown so violently that branches bent as well as reeds, and the nest overturned by the undulations of its branch let fall the four nestlings it contained. The next day I found the brood on the ground—three killed by the fall, the fourth still alive. The survivor was entrusted to Emile, who thrice a day went cricket-hunting on the turf in the neighbourhood to feed his charge. But crickets are not very large, while the nestling’s appetite was. Something else was preferred—ephippigers, collected from time to time on the dry stalks and prickly leaves of the Eryngium. The three insects brought me by Emile came from the shrike’s larder.