"It appears to me, little pet," said the fly, "thou must be very green to compare my delicate trunk, this instrument so nicely made, with the enormous and coarse cylinder upon which, in hot weather, I have often travelled. How can any one suppose that I have any relationship to the deformed and gigantic monster of which you have just now spoken?" Piccolissima thought that the little person was not wanting in vanity, and, while the fly was taking breath, observed that the trunk had disappeared, and that there was no possibility of discovering what the insect had done with it. The look, gloomy, and a little sullen, of the fly, recalled somewhat the funny mask of a harlequin, and Piccolissima was on the point of showing how one laughs with the lips, by laughing in the fly's face, when the latter forced air slightly through the breathing holes which open under the wings; the two little double scales, the winglets, which unfold at birth, began to vibrate; and Piccolissima, who just now remarked that this was the method that her new acquaintance took to emit sounds, was eager to listen to what he might say; so she made an effort to command herself, and became serious. "Do you not see, with your dull human intelligence, that my trunk is a pump, a hollow tube, an instrument for sucking which I stretch out and draw in at my pleasure?" While speaking thus, the fly thrust half way out from the cavity in the middle of his head, just under his eyes, a trunk with two or three joints in it; at the end was an opening like two black lips, folded over, with grooves or little hollows. The fly, thus urged to show the use of his trunk, or, more probably, forgetting the sequel of a discourse upon which he had entered in such a pompous style, flew upon the sugar, and set himself again to sucking it. Piccolissima again observed the little drops fall which she had noticed before. It seems that the fly, being only able to take up liquids through his trunk, wetted and dissolved the sugar that he might suck it up. It was a pleasant thing to see his lips swell out, and press, handle, and knead, as it were, the amber surface of the sugar in order to make it melt sooner, and enable him to draw it up faster. After having examined all these proceedings for some time, with great amusement, the little apprentice naturalist cried out, "Well, my little guest has a remarkable talent for eating barley sugar."