The burrow is not far off: the insect enters it and stores away the booty. I sit down, determined to wait for a new expedition, to wait hours if necessary, so that I may see if the extraordinary capture is repeated. My sitting attitude makes me take up the whole width of the path. Two raw conscripts heave in sight, their hair newly cut, wearing that inimitable automaton look which the first days of barrack-life bestow. They are chatting together, talking no doubt of home and the girl they left behind them; and each is innocently whittling a willow-switch with his knife. I am seized with a sudden apprehension. Ah, it is no easy matter to experiment on the public road, where, when the long-awaited event occurs at last, the arrival of a wayfarer is likely to disturb or ruin opportunities that may never return! I rise, anxiously, to make way for the conscripts; I stand back in the osier-bed and leave the narrow passage free. To do more would have been unwise. To say, ‘Don’t go this way, my good lads,’ would have made bad worse. They would have suspected some trap hidden under the sand, giving rise to questions to which no reply that I could have made would have sounded satisfactory. Besides, my request would have turned those idlers into lookers-on, very embarrassing company in such studies. I therefore got up without speaking and trusted to my lucky star. Alas and alack, my star betrayed me: the heavy regulation boot came straight down upon the ceiling of the Sphex! A shudder ran through me as though I myself had received the impress of the hobnailed sole. When the conscripts had passed, I proceeded to save what I could of the ruined burrow’s contents. The Sphex was there, crushed and mangled; and with her not only the Locust whom I had seen carried down, but two others as well, making three Locusts in all instead of the usual Crickets. What was the reason of this curious change? Were there no Crickets in the neighbourhood of the burrow and was the distressed Wasp making up for them with Locusts: a case of Hobson’s choice, in fact? I hesitate to believe it, for there was nothing about the neighbourhood to warrant the supposition that the favourite game was absent. Another, luckier than I, will unriddle this new and unknown mystery. The fact remains that the Yellow-winged Sphex, either from imperious necessity or for some reason that escapes me, sometimes replaces her chosen prey, the Cricket, with another prey, the Locust, presenting no external resemblance to the first, but itself also an Orthopteron.