The aforesaid bit of scarlet ribbon did not always spare me the tribulations which the entomologist must expect when experimenting on the public way. Here is a characteristic example. Ever since daybreak I have been ambushed, sitting on a stone, at the bottom of a ravine. The subject of my matutinal visit is the Languedocian Sphex. Three women, vine-pickers, pass in a group, on the way to their work. They give a glance at the man seated, apparently absorbed in reflection. At sunset, the same pickers pass again, carrying their full baskets on their heads. The man is still there, sitting on the same stone, with his eyes fixed on the same place. My motionless attitude, my long persistency in remaining at that deserted spot, must have impressed them deeply. As they passed by me, I saw one of them tap her forehead and heard her whisper to the others: ‘Un paouré inoucènt, pécaïre!’ And all three made the sign of the Cross. An innocent, she had said, un inoucènt, an idiot, a poor creature, quite harmless, but half-witted; and they had all made the sign of the Cross, an idiot being to them one with God’s seal stamped upon him. ‘How now!’ thought I. ‘What a cruel mockery of fate! You, who are so laboriously seeking to discover what is instinct in the animal and what is reason, you yourself do not even possess your reason in these good women’s eyes! What a humiliating reflection!’ No matter: pécaïre, that expression of supreme compassion, in the Provençal dialect, pécaïre, coming from the bottom of the heart, soon made me forget inoucènt. It is in this ravine with its three grape-gathering women that I would meet the reader, if he be not discouraged by the petty annoyances of which I have given him a foretaste. The Languedocian Sphex frequents these points, not in tribes congregating at the same spot when nest-building work begins, but as solitary individuals, sparsely distributed, settling wherever the chances of their vagabondage lead them. Even as her kinswoman, the Yellow-winged Sphex, seeks the society of her kind and the animation of a yard full of workers, the Languedocian Sphex prefers isolation, quiet and solitude. Graver of gait, more formal in her manners, of a larger size and also more sombrely clad, she always lives apart, not caring what others do, disdaining company, a genuine misanthrope among the Sphegidæ. The one is sociable, the other is not: a profound difference which in itself is enough to characterize them.