The mother, more skilled in nursery matters, occupies the lower floor. She alone digs, versed as she is in the properties of the perpendicular, which economizes labour while giving the greatest depth. She is the engineer, always in touch with the working-face of the shaft. The other is her labourer. He is stationed in the rear, ready to load the rubbish on his horny hod. Later, the excavatrix becomes a baker: she kneads the cakes for the children into cylinders; the father is then the baker’s boy. He brings her from outside the wherewithal for making flour. As in every well-regulated household, the mother is minister of the interior, the father minister of the exterior. This would explain the invariable position in their cylindrical home. The future will tell us if these conjectures truly correspond with the reality. For the moment, let us examine at our leisure, in the comfort of our own home, the central clod, so laboriously acquired. It contains a preserved foodstuff in the shape of a sausage nearly as long and as thick as a man’s finger. This is composed of a dark, compact material, arranged in layers, which we recognize as the Sheep-pellets reduced to small crumbs. Sometimes the dough is fine and almost homogeneous from one end of the cylinder to the other; more often the piece is a sort of hardbake, in which large fragments are held together by an amalgamation of cement. The baker apparently varies the more or less careful composition of her confectionery according to the time at her disposal. The stuff is tightly packed into the closed end of the burrow, where the walls are smoother and more elaborately treated than in the rest of the shaft. The point of the knife easily rids it of the surrounding earth, which peels off like a rind. In this way I obtain the food-cylinder free from any earthy stain. When this is done, let us enquire into the matter of the egg, for this pastry has certainly been manipulated for the sake of a grub. Guided by what I learnt in the old days from the Geotrupes, who lodge the egg at the lower end of their black-pudding, in a special recess contrived in the very heart of the provisions, I look to find the egg of the Minotaur, their near kinsmen, in a hatching-chamber right at the bottom of the sausage. I am mistaken. The egg sought for is not at the spot anticipated, nor at the other end, nor in any part whatsoever of the victuals.