I have not long to wait. An hour later I raise the cardboard screen. The Copris is on the strange pill and so busily engaged that she pays no attention to the daylight admitted. In other, less urgent circumstances, she would at once have slipped down and taken shelter from the troublesome light; this time, she does not move and imperturbably continues her work. Before my eyes she rakes away the red crust and uses the scrapings from the cleansed surface to spread over and solder the breach. It is hermetically sealed in a very short space of time. I stand amazed at the insect’s skill. Well, while the Copris is restoring a pill that does not belong to her, what is the grub that owns the other doing in the bell-glass? It continues to kick about hopelessly, vainly lavishing cement that is incapable of setting. Put to the test in the morning, it does not succeed until the afternoon in closing the aperture; and then the job is anything but well done. The borrowed mother, on the other hand, has not taken twenty minutes to remedy the accident most excellently. She does even more. After the most important part is finished and the afflicted grub succoured, she stands all day, all night and the next day on the newly-closed pill. She brushes it daintily with her tarsi to get rid of the layer of earth; she obliterates the dents, smooths the rough places and adjusts the curve, until from a shapeless and soiled pill it becomes an ovoid vying in precision with those which she had already manufactured in her glass jar. Such care bestowed upon a strange grub deserves attention. I must go on. I slip into the jar a second pill, similar to the foregoing, ruptured at the top, with an opening larger than on the first occasion, one about a sixteenth of an inch square. The greater the difficulty, the more praiseworthy will the restoration be. It is, indeed, difficult to close. The grub, a fat baby, is wildly gesticulating and excreting through the window. Leaning over the hole, its new mother seems to console it. She is like a nurse bending over the cradle. Meanwhile her helpful legs are working with a will, scratching around the yawning aperture to obtain the wherewithal to stop it. But the materials, half-dried this time, are hard and unyielding. They are slow in coming; and the quantity is too small for so big a hole. No matter: what with the grub continuing to shoot forth its putty and the other mixing it with her own scrapings, to give it consistency, and afterwards spreading it, the opening closes up. The thankless task has taken a whole afternoon. It is a good lesson for me. I shall be more careful in future. I shall choose softer pills and, instead of opening them by removing the materials, I shall simply lift the wall by shreds until the grub is laid bare. The mother will only have to flatten down those shreds and solder them together.