Take an example of something wonderful in insect life, as it chanced to come under our notice a few days ago [September 1872]. We were raking hay--raking hay, too, after others had raked the same ground shortly before us, for we are most particular that, both for the look of the thing, as well as for the profit, not a wisp, not a strawlet shall be left upon the ground--when, as we raked, we came across a dead mole. No rare or wonderful thing, the reader may exclaim, but rare enough when you come to think of it, and wonderful enough, too, to attract the attention of any one even less observant of natural history than Nether Lochaber. Lying on its side was the mole, already half-hidden by the swiftly growing aftermath. Touching it with the corner of our rake, and moving it slightly, we got a glimpse of a yellow-banded beetle busy underneath; and at once understanding what was going on, we called our bairns, a couple of girls and a boy, who were raking and laughing a la Madame de Sévigné in the field beside us, to give them a lesson on entomology; and as our lesson was fresh and to the point, and interesting, though we say it ourselves, and rather out of the common track of entomological experience, we give it to the reader, that he may know and believe, and reverently ponder, a truth that has never been so well expressed as by St. Augustine, the sturdy, old, bellicose Bishop of Hippo, who of all the Fathers had the most sensitive nose for the out-ferreting of a heretic, and who, when he got hold of one, treated him very much as a Scotch terrier does a rat--but who could say and do good things notwithstanding. Deus magnus in magnis, maximus in minimis. God is great, that is, in great things, but greatest of all in least things. The mole, as we have said, was lying on his side on a grassy patch of fast-growing aftermath, and our glimpse of the beetle beneath showed us that it was the Necrophorus vespillo, or burying-beetle, rare anywhere in Britain, and so rare in Lochaber and the west coast, that this was only the third or fourth instance in which we had met with it. It is a black beetle, rather more than an inch in length, with two bright orange-coloured bands across the back, and more active in all its movements than any of its congeners. There were just two beetles, observe--a pair, male and female--engaged upon the mole, and the "mole" of Adrianus, when a-building, showed not more labour and not half the mechanical skill or indomitable perseverance on the part of its constructors exhibited by these tiny but thoroughly skilled excavators in the case of their mole. "You see that mole," we said to our attentive audience, leaning upon our rake for the moment, as if it were a sceptre of prerogative and power, as in truth it was. "It is almost as big as an ordinary sized rat--bigger, you will confess, than three full-grown mice. It has only been dead, say, a dozen of hours; his sleek and still glossy coat proves it.