This, by day, in the hours of blazing sunshine, is where the solitary prefers to be, in the blessed heat gently shaded by the stone. When turned out of this hot bath, his supreme felicity, he brandishes his knotty tail and swiftly retreats indoors, out of reach of the light and of our eyes. Replace the stone and come back fifteen minutes later: we shall find him once more on the threshold of the cavern, where it is so pleasant when a generous sun warms the roof. The cold season is thus passed in a very monotonous fashion. Both in the hamlet of the enclosure and the menagerie of the cages, the Scorpions go out neither by day nor at night, as I observe by the barricade of sand which remains untouched at the entrance to the home. Are they torpid? Not a bit of it! My frequent visits show them always ready for action, with curved and threatening tails. If the weather grows cooler, they retreat to the bottom of their burrows; if it is fine, they return to the threshold to warm their backs by the touch of the sunny stone. Nothing more for the moment: the anchorite’s life is spent in long spells of meditation, either in the cool moist crypt or under the porch of the house, behind the sandy barricade. In the course of April a sudden change takes place. In the cages, the shelter of the potsherds is abandoned. Gravely the occupants roam around the arena, clamber up the trellis and stand there, even by day. Several of them sleep out and do not go home again, preferring the out-of-door distractions to soft slumbers in the alcove under ground. In the hamlet in the enclosure, events are more serious. Some of the inhabitants, selected from the smaller, leave the house at night and go wandering without my knowing what becomes of them. I expect to see them return at the end of their stroll, for no other part of the paddock has stones to suit them. Well, not one comes home; all that have gone have disappeared for good. Soon the big ones also display the same vagabond mood; and at last the emigration becomes so active that a moment is at hand when I shall have nothing left of my free colony. Farewell to my lovingly cherished plans! The open-air community, on which I based my fondest hopes, becomes rapidly depopulated; its inhabitants make off, vanish I know not whither. All my seeking fails to recover a single one of the runaways.