How often, at nightfall, by the last glimmers of daylight, have I not come upon him as I wandered through my garden, hunting for ideas! Something runs away, rolling over and over in front of me. Is it a dead leaf blown along by the wind? No, it is the pretty little Toad disturbed in the midst of his pilgrimage. He hurriedly takes shelter under a stone, a clod of earth, a tuft of grass, recovers from his excitement and loses no time in picking up his liquid note. On this evening of national merry-making there are nearly a dozen of him tinkling one against the other around me. Most of them are squatting among the rows of flower-pots that form a sort of lobby outside my house. Each has his own note, always the same, lower in one case, higher in another, a short, clear note, melodious and of exquisite purity. With their slow, rhythmical cadence, they seem to be intoning litanies. Cluck, says one; click, responds another, on a finer note; clock, adds a third, the tenor of the band. And this is repeated indefinitely, like the bells of the village pealing on a holiday: cluck, click, clock! cluck, click, clock! As a song this litany has neither head nor tail to it; as a collection of pure sounds, it is delicious. [113] “A little animated clay, capable of pleasure and pain.” To the scrutiny of this miracle, with its infinity of forms, Fabre devotes himself with touching sympathy and indefatigable activity. He dedicates his day to it; and at night he is still working. And in this work, which seems to admit of no relaxation, he appears to know nothing of fatigue. The love of his task upholds him and inspires him. When night has fallen, the observer has still one resource left; he can listen for the rustle or the song of the insect that has so far escaped him in its coming and going. We might, perhaps, have discovered the insect, but he discovers something very different. He makes a series of observations by the light of a lantern in the brushwood or before the apparatus in the harmas. During the two hottest months, when the darkness is profound and a little coolness follows the furnace of the day, it is easy for me, with a lantern in my hand, to watch that magnificent Spider, the Epeira, in the manufacture of her web. She has established herself at a height convenient for observation, between a row of cypress-trees and a thicket of laurels, at the entrance of a path frequented by nocturnal moths. The situation, it seems, is a good one, for the Epeira does not change it all the season, although she renews her net almost every night.