It must be many years now (how they do shut up in these latter days like a telescope) since I confided to you in these columns the joy--not unmixed with reverence--of my first interview with that worthy small person (I am sure he must be a person) the tumble-bug of the U.S.A. I looked upon him in those days as on the whole the most industrious and athletic little creature it had ever been my privilege to encounter. I am obliged now to take most of that back, for to-day I have discovered that he isn’t a circumstance to his Mexican cousin on this side the Rio Grande. At any rate, the specimens I have met with here are not only bigger, but work half as hard again, and about twice as quick. I was sitting just now in the verandah in front of this ranche cabin, waiting for the horses to be saddled-up at the corral just below, and looking lazily, now eastward over the river and the wide Texan plains beyond, fading away in the haze till the horizon looked like the Atlantic in a calm, now westward to the jagged outline of the Sierra Nevada, gleaming in the sunshine sixty miles away, when I became aware of something moving at my feet. Looking down I found that it was a tumble-bug rolling a ball of dirt he had put together, till it was at least four times as big as himself, towards the rough stony descent just beyond the verandah, at a pace which fairly staggered me. In a few seconds he was across the floor, and in amongst the stones which lay thickly over the slope beyond. Here his troubles began. First he pushed his ball backwards over a big stone, on the further side of which it fell, and he with it, headlong--no, not headlong, stern foremost--some five inches, rolling over one another twice at the bottom. But he never quitted hold, and began pushing away merrily again without a moment’s pause. Then he ran the ball into a _cul-de-sac_ between two stones, some inches high. After two or three dead heaves, which lifted the ball at least his own length up the side of the stones--and you must remember, to judge of the feat, that he was standing on his head to do it--he quitted hold, turned round, and looked at the situation. I am almost certain I saw him scratch his ear, or at least the side of his head, with his fore-claw. In a second or two he fixed on again with his hind-claws, pushed the ball out of the _cul-de-sac_, and continued his journey. If that bug didn’t put two and two together, by what process did he get out of that _cul-de-sac?_ “Cogito, ergo sum.” Was I wrong in calling him a person? Well, I won’t trouble you further with particulars of his journey, but he ran his big ball into his hole under a mesquite-bush, 19 1/2 yards from the spot on the verandah where I first noticed him, in eleven minutes and a few seconds by my watch. I made a calculation before mounting that, comparing my bug with an average Mexican, five feet eight inches high, and weighing ten stone, the ball of dirt would be at least