in which the pollen with the egg of the bee was sealed up. When the egg
hatches, the grub finds a loaf of bread at hand for its nourishment.
These little barrels were each headed up with a dozen circular bits of
leaves cut as with a compass, exactly fitting the cylinder, one upon the
other. The wall of the cylinder was made up of oblong cuttings from
leaves, about half an inch wide, and three quarters of an inch long, a
dozen of them lapped over one another, and fitted together in the most
workmanlike manner.

In my boyhood I occasionally saw this bee cutting out her
nesting-material. Her mandibles worked like perfect shears. When she had
cut out her circular or her oblong patches, she rolled them up, and,
holding them between her legs, flew away with them. I have seen her
carry them into little openings in old rails, or old posts. About the
period of hatching, I do not know.

III

Swallows, in hawking through the air for insects, do not snap their game
up as do the true flycatchers. Their mouths are little nets which they
drive through the air with the speed of airplanes. A few mornings ago
the air was cold, but it contained many gauzy, fuzzy insects from the
size of mosquitoes down to gnats. They kept near the ground. I happened
to be sitting on the sunny side of a rock and saw the swallows sweep
past. One came by within ten feet of me and drove straight on to a very
conspicuous insect which disappeared in his open mouth in a flash. How
many hundreds or thousands of such insects they must devour each day!
Then think of how many insects the flycatchers and warblers and other
insect-eating birds must consume in the course of a season!

IV

We little suspect how the woods and wayside places swarm with life. We
see little of it unless we watch and wait. The wild creatures are
cautious about revealing themselves: their enemies are on the lookout
for them. Certain woods at night are alive with flying squirrels which,
except for some accident, we never see by day. Then there are the night
prowlers--skunks, foxes, coons, minks, and owls--yes, and mice.

The wild mice we rarely see. The little shrew mole, which I know is
active at night, I have never seen but once. I once set a trap, called
the delusion trap, in the woods by some rocks where I had no reason to
suspect there were more mice than elsewhere, and two mornings later it
was literally packed full of mice, half a dozen or more.

Turn over a stone in the fi