rhaps also for children.

"I have allowed myself to be taken in," said our beetle to himself.
"And now there's nothing for it but to take _them_ in, in turn."

So said, so done. Away he went, and he stayed away all day, and stayed
away all night; and his wife sat there, a forsaken widow.

"Oh," said the other beetles, "this fellow whom we received into our
family is nothing more than a thorough vagabond. He has gone away, and
has left his wife a burden upon our hands."

[Illustration: THE SCHOLARS FIND THE BEETLE.]

"Well, then, she shall be unmarried again, and sit here among my
daughters," said the mother. "Fie on the villain who forsook her!"

In the meantime the beetle had been journeying on, and had sailed
across the ditch on a cabbage leaf. In the morning two persons came to
the ditch. When they saw him, they took him up, and turned him over
and over, and looked very learned, especially one of them--a boy.

"Allah sees the black beetle in the black stone and in the black rock.
Is not that written in the Koran?" Then he translated the beetle's
name into Latin, and enlarged upon the creature's nature and history.
The second person, an older scholar, voted for carrying him home. He
said they wanted just such good specimens; and this seemed an uncivil
speech to our beetle, and in consequence he flew suddenly out of the
speaker's hand. As he had now dry wings, he flew a tolerable distance,
and reached a hot-bed, where a sash of the glass roof was partly open,
so he quietly slipped in and buried himself in the warm earth.

"Very comfortable it is here," said he.

Soon after he went to sleep, and dreamed that the emperor's favourite
horse had fallen, and had given him his golden shoes, with the promise
that he should have two more.

That was all very charming. When the beetle woke up, he crept forth
and looked around him. What splendour was in the hothouse! In the
background great palm trees growing up on high; the sun made them look
transparent; and beneath them what a luxuriance of green, and of
beaming flowers, red as fire, yellow as amber, or white as
fresh-fallen snow.

"This is an incomparable plenty of plants," cried the beetle. "How
good they will taste when they are decayed! A capital store-room this!
There must certainly be relations of mine living here. I will just see
if I can find any one with whom I may associate. I'm proud, certainly,
and I'm proud of being so." And so he prowled about in the e