At last, about ten o’clock, a separation takes place. The male has come across a potsherd whose shelter appears to him suitable. He releases one of his consort’s hands, but only one, and still holding her firmly by the other he scratches with his legs and sweeps with his tail. A grotto opens. He enters it, and gradually, without violence, he draws the patient female into it. Presently both have disappeared. A little bank of sand closes their dwelling. The couple are at home. To disturb them would be a blunder; I should intervene too soon, at an inopportune moment, if I attempted to see at once what is happening down there. The preliminaries will possibly last the greater part of the night, and long vigils are beginning to tell upon my eighty years. My legs give way and sand trickles into my eyes. Let us go to bed. All night I dream of Scorpions. They run under my blankets, they pass over my face, and I am not greatly disturbed thereby, such remarkable things do I see in my imagination! [116] Incidentally we may remark that it is not only in his imagination that insects frequent his bed-clothes and caress his bare skin. Here we come to an episode of the entomologist’s private life. When wearing his last costume, the Pine Processionary caterpillar is very disagreeable to handle, or even to observe at close quarters. I happened, quite unexpectedly, to learn this more thoroughly than I wished. After unsuspectingly passing a whole morning with my insects, stooping over them, magnifying-glass in hand, to examine the working of their slits, I found my forehead and eyelids suffering with redness for twenty-four hours, and afflicted with an itching even more painful and persistent than that produced by the sting of a nettle. On seeing me come down to dinner in this sad plight, with my eyes reddened and swollen and my face unrecognisable, the family anxiously inquired what had happened to me, and were not reassured until I told them of my mishap. I unhesitatingly attribute my painful experience to the red hairs ground to powder and collected into flakes. My breath sought them out in the open pockets and carried them to my face, which was very near. The unthinking intervention of my hands, which now and again sought to ease the discomfort, merely aggravated the ill by spreading the irritating dust. [117] What would to another have been merely an annoying accident without other bearing than a commonplace lesson of prudence, became for him the starting-point of a whole series of instructive experiments.