The hermit’s wallet has retained a part of the digestive residues, residues destined to disappear completely, for at the moment of the nymphosis the body must be free of any impurity. With this cement, which has undergone a prolonged refining in the intestine, the grub plasters its sandy wall. Using its round rump as a trowel, it smooths, polishes and repolishes the layer of stucco, until the rude cell of the start becomes a velvet-lined chamber. All is ready for the stripping that releases the nymph. This nymph has peculiarities deserving special mention. The male’s trident, in particular, is already, both in shape and size, what it will be in the adult Beetle. At last, when October is at hand, I obtain the perfect insect. The total period of development, beginning with the egg, has lasted five months. Let us return to the Minotaur mother who is provided with 255 pellets, 225 of which were amassed by the male, before he went out to die, and 30 by the widow herself. When the great heat comes, she no longer shows herself at all, detained at the bottom of the shaft by her domestic duties. In spite of my impatience to know what is going on indoors, I wait, keeping ever on the watch. At last October brings the first rains, so greatly wished for by the husbandman and the Dung-beetle alike. Recent mounds become numerous in the fields. This is the season of autumnal rejoicings, when the soil, which has been like a cinder all the summer, recovers its moisture and is covered with green grass to which the shepherd leads his flock; it is the festival of the Minotaur, the exodus of the youngsters who, for the first time, enter into the joys of the daylight, among the sugar-plums dropped by the Sheep in the pastures. However, nothing appears under the cover of my apparatus. It is no use waiting any longer, the season is too far advanced. I take the pylon to pieces. The mother is dead; she is even in tatters, a sign of an end already remote. I find her at the top of the vertical shaft, not far from the orifice. This position seems to show that, when her work was done, the mother climbed up to die out of doors as the father had done before her. A sudden and final break-down overcame her on the way, almost at her door. I expected something better; I pictured her coming out accompanied by her offspring: the plucky creature deserved to see her family revelling in the last fine days of the year.