or wriggles, it again climbs back up.

Imagine some caterpillar reader shuddering at this horror--this lethal
chamber where prominent caterpillars are slowly eaten alive. Yet scenes
like this occur all through Fabre, and are described with great relish.
If he wrote of them in a dry professional way, it would sound
scientific, and I could read it in a cool, detached spirit with never a
flutter. But he does it so humanly that you get to be friends with these
creatures, and then he springs some grisly little scene on you that
gives you the creeps, and explains to you that the said little scene is
going on all the time; and it makes you feel as though there were
nothing but red fangs in the world.

Fabre at one time was offered the post of tutor to Napoleon III's son,
but he preferred to live in poverty in the country, where he could keep
up his studies. No money, no honors could tempt him away from his work.
Perhaps this was noble. But it seems to me he made a mistake. In fact,
this was the greatest and most fatal mistake of his life.

If he had gone to Napoleon, he might have moped awhile at first, and
felt guilty. But he would have gone right on loving insects and wanting
to study them. Hence he would have soon begun looking around the palace
for specimens. And this might have led to his discovering riches
indoors.

Suppose he had written about that bug that takes its name from our beds,
and helped us to understand its persistent devotion to man. According to
Ealand, the scientist, they are not wholly bad. They were once supposed
to be good for hysteria if taken internally. The Ancients gave seven to
adults and four to children, he says, "to cure lethargy." But the best
Ealand can do is to give us bits of information like this, whereas
Fabre, if he had lived in his bedroom, could have been their
interpreter.

That's his failure--his books are over-weighted with bugs of the
fields. I have plowed through long chapters without getting away for a
minute from beetles. In bugs of the field I take a due interest (which,
I may add, isn't much), but the need of humanity is to know about bugs
of the home.

[Illustration: They were said to cure lethargy]

In His Baby Blue Ship

There are some people who can't enjoy fairy-stories, and don't like
imagining. They are a bit too hard-headed. I don't blame such people;
they are all right enough in their way. Only they ought not to go around
saying fairy-stories are sil