Nevertheless she still requires entreating. The impassioned lover resumes his ecstatic immobility, with his quivering arms outstretched like the limbs of a cross. At brief intervals the amorous outbursts, with blows conscientiously distributed, recur in alternation with periods of repose, during which the male holds his fore-legs crosswise, or else masters the female by the bridle of her antennae. At last the flagellated beauty allows herself to be touched by the charm attendant on his thumps. She yields. Coupling takes place and lasts for twenty hours. The heroic part of the male's performance is over. Dragged backwards behind the female, the poor fellow strives to uncouple himself. His mate carts him about from leaf to leaf, wherever she pleases, so that she may choose the bit of green stuff to her taste. Sometimes he also takes a gallant resolve and, like the female, begins to browse. You lucky creatures, who, so as not to lose a moment of your four or five weeks' existence, yoke together the cravings of love and hunger! Your motto is, "A short life and a merry one." The Cerocoma, who is a golden green like the Cantharides, seems to have partly adopted the amorous rites of her rival in dress. The male, always the elegant sex in the insect tribe, wears special ornaments. The horns or antennae, magnificently complicated, form as it were two tufts of a thick head of hair. It is to this that the name Cerocoma refers: the creature crested with its horns. When a bright sun shines into the breeding-cage, it is not long before the insects form couples on the bunch of everlastings. Hoisted on the female, whom he embraces and holds with his two pairs of hind-legs, the male sways his head and corselet up and down, all in a piece. This oscillatory movement has not the fiery precipitation of that of the Cantharides; it is calmer and as it were rhythmical. The abdomen moreover remains motionless and seems unskilled in those slaps, as of a washerwoman's bat, which the amorous denizen of the ash-tree so vigorously distributes with his belly. While the front half of the body swings up and down, the fore-legs execute magnetic passes on either side of the tight-clasped female, moving with a sort of twirl, so rapidly that the eye can hardly follow them. The female appears insensible to this flagellatory twirl. She innocently curls her antennae. The rejected suitor leaves her and moves on to another. His dizzy, twirling passes, his protestations are everywhere refused. The moment has not yet arrived, or rather the spot is not propitious. Captivity appears to weigh upon the future mothers. Before listening to their wooers they must have the open air, the sudden joyful flight from cluster to cluster on the sunlit slope, all gold with everlastings. Apart from the idyll of the twirling passes, a mitigated form of the Cantharides' blows, the Cerocoma refused to yield before my eyes to the last act of the bridal.