eloquent enough of our emptiness: there is no need
to add imaginary horrors. The worm of the sepulchre is an invention of
cantankerous minds, incapable of seeing things as they are. Covered by
but a few inches of earth, the dead can sleep their quiet sleep: no Fly
will ever come to take advantage of them.

At the surface of the soil, exposed to the air, the hideous invasion is
possible; aye, it is the invariable rule. For the melting down and
remoulding of matter, man is no better, corpse for corpse, than the
lowest of the brutes. Then the Fly exercises her rights and deals with
us as she does with any ordinary animal refuse. Nature treats us with
magnificent indifference in her great regenerating factory: placed in
her crucibles, animals and men, beggars and kings are 1 and all alike.
There you have true equality, the only equality in this world of ours:
equality in the presence of the maggot.

CHAPTER 8. THE PINE-PROCESSIONARY.

Drover Dingdong's Sheep followed the Ram which Panurge had maliciously
thrown overboard and leapt nimbly into the sea, one after the other,
"for you know," says Rabelais, "it is the nature of the sheep always to
follow the first, wheresoever it goes."

The Pine caterpillar is even more sheeplike, not from foolishness, but
from necessity: where the first goes all the others go, in a regular
string, with not an empty space between them.

They proceed in single file, in a continuous row, each touching with
its head the rear of the one in front of it. The complex twists and
turns described in his vagaries by the caterpillar leading the van are
scrupulously described by all the others. No Greek theoria winding its
way to the Eleusinian festivals was ever more orderly. Hence the name
of Processionary given to the gnawer of the pine.

His character is complete when we add that he is a rope-dancer all his
life long: he walks only on the tight-rope, a silken rail placed in
position as he advances. The caterpillar who chances to be at the head
of the procession dribbles his thread without ceasing and fixes it on
the path which his fickle preferences cause him to take. The thread is
so tiny that the eye, though armed with a magnifying-glass, suspects it
rather than sees it.

But a second caterpillar steps on the slender foot-board and doubles it
with his thread; a third trebles it; and all the others, however many
there be, add the sticky spray from their spinnerets, so much so that,
when the