The excavator does not dally long, especially in the sun, whose glare annoys him. Steadying himself on his fourth pair of legs, the Scorpion rakes the ground with the three other pairs: he turns it over, reducing it to a loose dust with a graceful agility that reminds us of a Dog scratching a hole in which to bury a bone. After the brisk twirling of the legs comes the touch of the broom. With his tail laid flat and relaxed to the utmost, he pushes back the earthy mass, making the same movement as does our elbow when thrusting an obstacle aside. If the rubbish thus shot back be not sufficiently out of the way, the sweeper returns, repeats the process and finishes the job. Observe that the pincers, notwithstanding their strength, never take part in the digging, even to the extent of extracting a grain of sand. They are reserved for feeding, fighting, and, above all, enquiry, and would lose the exquisite sensitiveness of their fingers if used for that heavy task. In this way the legs and tail, in repeated alternations, scratch the soil and thrust the rubbish outside. At last the worker disappears beneath the potsherd. A mound of sand obstructs the entrance to the vault. At moments we see it shaking and partly slipping, signs that the work is still going on with a further shooting of rubbish, until the cell attains a suitable size. When the hermit wants to go out, he will, without difficulty push back the crumbling barricade. The Black Scorpion of our houses has not this capacity for making himself a crypt. He is found in the mortar collected at the bottom of walls, the woodwork disjointed by the damp, the rubbish-heaps in dark places, but he restricts himself to using these refuges as he finds them, being unable to improve the hiding-place by his own industry. He does not know how to dig. This ignorance is apparently due to his feeble broom, his smooth, slender tail, very different from the Languedocian’s, which is powerful and armed with knotty protuberances. In the open air, the colony in the enclosure finds a lodging modelled by my care. Under the flat stones where I have contrived to outline a cell in the sandy earth, each of them at once disappears and labours to complete the work, as I perceived by the mound heaped upon the threshold. Wait a few more days and lift the stone: at a depth of three or four inches we see the lair, the burrow, occupied at night and open also by day, when the weather is bad. Sometimes a sudden bend widens the recess into a spacious chamber. In front of the mansion, immediately under the stone, is the entrance-hall.