When we got out to the row of brooms, we found many of the soft white cushions on all the bushes. But some of them were torn and dishevelled. And in these torn masses many tiny round particles could be seen. These little black specks are simply eggs, insect eggs, as I told Mary, and soon she had discovered among them some slightly larger but still very small red spots which were waving tiny black feet and feelers about. They were of course the baby insects just hatching from the eggs. "Does the mother lay the eggs in these little white cushions and then go away and leave them?" asks Mary. "No, she stays right by them," I answer. "But where is she then? I can't--Yes I can too," cries Mary in great triumph. "Here she is at one end of the egg cushion. She is a part of it." "Well, no, not exactly," I have to say. "It is part of _her_, or rather she spins the cushion, which is really a sac or soft box of white wax, in which to lay her eggs. Something the way the spiders do, you know. Only their egg box is made of silk and usually fastened to a fence rail or on the bark of a tree and left there. But some of the spiders, the large, swiftly running, black kinds that live under stones, carry the silken ball with the eggs inside about with them, fastened to the end of the body. Well, this cottony cushion scale insect--that's its right name--keeps its waxen sac of eggs fastened to it, but as the egg sac is much larger than the insect itself, it can't run about any more, but has to stay for all the rest of the time until it dies in the spot where it makes the sac. However, as it gets all the food it wants by sticking its slender little beak into the broom or other plant it is on and sucking up the fresh sap, it gets on very well." "But what makes some of the egg cushions--how pretty they are, too!--so torn and pulled open," asks Mary, who has listened to my long speech very nicely. She often gets impatient when I lecture for too many minutes together. "That is for you to find out," I say. "There is a dreadful thing going on here if you can only see it. But a rather good thing too. Good for the broom bushes anyway, and as they are _my_ broom bushes and I like their flowers, good for me." Just then a very stubby, round-backed, quick little red beetle with black spots walked off a broom stem on to Mary's hand. She didn't scream, of course, nor even jerk her hand away. She may learn when she is older to be frightened when pretty, harmless, little lady-bird beetles walk on her. But now she likes all sorts of small animals, and is not afraid at all.