Very much on the alert, he sounds his surroundings with his long vibrating antennae; he toddles and leaps along with a vigour which his future obesity will no longer permit. This is the age of stomach troubles. What are we to give him to eat? I do not know. I offer him adult diet--the tender leaves of a lettuce. He disdains to bite it; or perhaps his bites escape me, so tiny would they be. In a few days, what with my ten households, I see myself loaded with family cares. What shall I do with my five or six thousand Crickets, an attractive flock, to be sure, but one I cannot bring up in my ignorance of the treatment required? I will give you liberty, gentle creatures! I will confide you to the sovereign nurse and schoolmistress, Nature! It is done. Here and there about my orchard, in the most favourable localities, I loose my legions. What a concert I shall have before my door next year if all goes well! But no! There will probably be silence, for the terrible extermination will follow which corresponds with the fertility of the mother. A few couples only may survive: that is the most we can hope. The first to come to the living feast and the most eager at the slaughter are the little grey lizard and the ant. I am afraid this latter, hateful filibuster that it is, will not leave me a single Cricket in my garden. It falls upon the tiny Crickets, eviscerates them, and devours them with frantic greed. Satanic creature! And to think that we place it in the front rank of the insect world! The books celebrate its virtues and never tire of its praises; the naturalists hold it in high esteem and add to its reputation daily; so true is it of animals, as of man, that of the various means of living in history the most certain is to do harm to others. Every one knows the _Bousier_ (dung-beetle) and the Necrophorus, those lively murderers; the gnat, the drinker of blood; the wasp, the irascible bully with the poisoned dagger; and the ant, the maleficent creature which in the villages of the South of France saps and imperils the rafters and ceilings of a dwelling with the same energy it brings to the eating of a fig. I need say no more; human history is full of similar examples of the useful misunderstood and undervalued and the calamitous glorified. What with the ants and other exterminating forces, the massacre was so great that the colonies of Crickets in my orchard, so numerous at the outset, were so far decimated that I could not continue my observations, but had to resort to the outside world for further information. In August, among the detritus of decaying leaves, in little oases whose turf is not burned by the sun, I find the young Cricket has already grown to a considerable size; he is all black, like the adult, without a vestige of the white cincture of the early days. He has no domicile. The shelter of a dead leaf, the cover afforded by a flat stone is sufficient; he is a nomad, and careless where he takes his repose.