“What are you doing over there, you booby, baking in the heat? Come here, under the foliage; see how comfortable I am! “That is what I seem to read in my companion’s eyes. “Oh, my Dog, my friend,” I should answer, if you could only understand, “man is tormented by a desire for knowledge, whereas your torments are confined to a desire for bones and, from time to time, a desire for your sweetheart! This, notwithstanding our devoted friendship, creates a certain difference between us, even though people nowadays say that we are more or less related, almost cousins. I feel the need to know things and am content to bake in the heat; you feel no such need and retire into the cool shade.” Yes, the hours drag when you lie waiting for an insect that does not come. [110] Yet from his expeditions into the countryside, he almost always brings back some new pensioner who serves to enrich his collection of intimates admitted to the familiarities of cohabitation. For not only the harmas but his work-room becomes, by such chance means, an entomological museum, in which Flies, Scorpions, Caterpillars, Spiders, and I know not what else live side by side and in succession. And when their turn is over, when the first comers have to make room for new arrivals, the master parts from his children with regret, dismissing them with the most kindly speeches, embellished by the most salutary advice. Here, for example, is the little speech which he makes to the Sphex: You pretty Sphex-wasps hatched before my eyes, brought up by my hand, ration by ration, on a bed of sand in an old quill-box; you whose transformations I have followed step by step, starting up from my sleep in alarm lest I should have missed the moment when the nymph is bursting its swaddling-bands or the wing leaving its case; you who have taught me so much and learned nothing yourselves: O my pretty Sphex-wasps, fly away without fear of my tubes, my boxes, my bottles, or any of my receptacles, through this warm sunlight beloved of the Cicadæ; go, but beware of the Praying Mantis, who is plotting your ruin on the flowering heads of the thistles, and mind the Lizard, who is lying in wait for you on the sunny slopes; go in peace, dig your burrows, stab your Crickets scientifically and continue your kind, to procure one day for others what you have given me: the few moments of happiness in my life! [111]