One hour from the time of her arrival at this place, and two hours from the time that we began to watch her, she flew away and was gone for an unusually long time. We can only suppose that when she absented herself in this way she was visiting the spot to which she wished to convey her booty. On her return she seemed to be filled with a new idea, for after climbing to the top of a tall stout weed that grew near by, she came down, seized the spider, and tried to drag it up the stem. Perhaps she meant to lift it to such an elevation that she could fly with it, but it was too heavy for her and fell after she had raised it to a height of three inches. She then flew away again, and on her return we caught her, fearing that she was becoming discouraged and that she might presently depart to be seen no more. Had there been any prospect of her solving the difficulty that beset her our patience might have held out to the end, but this was evidently a case in which there was a failure of instinct, or intelligence, or whatever faculty was concerned. More than a year passed before we had another opportunity of solving this problem of scelestus, and the pleasure with which we hailed her second appearance in our garden may be easily imagined. This time the wasp had made her nest, but was not ready to fill it, and when we first saw her she was running about without any particular aim in view, although at the time we supposed her to be hunting. Before long she went and took a look at the neat round hole which she had made near the fence that separates the garden from the woods. The earth that had been taken out either had been carried to a distance or had been swept away after the digging was completed, for there was no pile to be seen. This was at two o’clock of a cloudy afternoon. It may be that she needed the stimulus of sunshine to make her hunt, or perhaps she realized that what was left of the day would not give her sufficient time to capture her spider and bring it home. At any rate, she spent the remainder of the afternoon in making short excursions around her nest, attended, at a little distance, by a smaller blue wasp, Pompilus subviolaceus, whose presence she did not seem to notice. These trips took her from ten to twenty feet from the nest, each occupying from fifteen minutes to half an hour. At every return to the nest she flattened herself out on the ground and wriggled in the dust, and then dragged herself all around it in the strangest manner. Perhaps these actions were indications of pleasurable emotion. We had seen them once before, in Priononyx atrata just before she carried a locust into her nest.