February was drawing to a close. The weather was mild and the sun warm. We had gone off in a family party, with the children’s lunch, an apple and a chunk of bread, in the basket, to see the almond trees in bloom. When lunch-time came, we were resting under some great oaks, when Anna, the youngest of the household, always on the watch for “beasties” with her six-year-old eyes, called to me from a distance of a few yards: “A beastie!” she cried. “Two, three, four of them! And such pretty ones! Come and look, papa, come and look!” I ran up to her. The child had dug into the sand, to no great depth, with a bit of stick, and was breaking up a sort of rag of fur. I produced my pocket trowel and joined her in the task; and in a moment I possessed a dozen Trox-beetles, most of whom I found in a filthy tangle of fur and broken bones. They were working away at it and apparently feeding on it. I had disturbed them at their banquet. What could this mess be? That was the fundamental question to be solved. Brillat-Savarin [30] declared as an axiom: “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” If I wish to know the Trox, I must first enquire what she eats. Reader, pity the sorrows of the naturalist! Behold me scrutinizing, meditating, conjecturing, my mind set in a whirl by an unspeakable problem, a stercoral problem. Whom am I to hold responsible for this fibrous lump, in which I seem to distinguish Rabbit’s fur as the chief ingredient? The probabilities point to the dog. Rabbits abound on the Sérignan hills; they even enjoy a certain reputation among our epicures. The village sportsmen hunt them assiduously; and their Dogs, those poachers heedless of licences and of the police, do not fail to harry them on their own account, at all seasons, close or open. Two of them are known to me by report: Mirate and Flambard. They meet by appointment of a morning in the market-place, exchange an inquisitive glance, inspect each other with the three regulation turns, lift a leg against the wall ... and off they go! For the best part of the morning you can hear them on the neighbouring hill-sides, giving vent to short, sharp yelps, close on the heels of a Rabbit who scampers from thicket to thicket, with his little white scut in the air. At last they return home: the result of the expedition may be read on their bloody chaps: the Rabbit was eaten on the spot, just as it was, skin and all. Does this really explain the substance on which my Trox-beetles were living? It seems to me that it does. Henceforth it would appear an easy matter to rear them. I install the insects in a large earthenware pan with a bed of sand and a wire-gauze cover. The provisions consist of Dog-droppings, dried on the road-mender’s stone-heaps beside the highway. My menagerie absolutely refuse to look at them. I have made a mistake. Then what does it want?