hous
strength. The materials are many and sundry, so much so that we might
imagine that we had the work of dissimilar builders before our eyes, if
frequent transitions did not tell us the contrary.

With the young ones, the novices, it starts with a sort of deep basket
in rustic wicker-work. The twigs employed present nearly always the same
characteristics and are none other than bits of small, stiff roots, long
steeped and peeled under water. The grub that has made a find of these
fibers saws them with its mandibles and cuts them into little straight
sticks, which it fixes one by one to the edge of its basket, always
crosswise, perpendicular to the axis of the work.

Picture a circle surrounded by a bristling mass of tangents, or rather a
polygon with its sides extended in all directions. On this assemblage
of straight lines we place repeated layers of others, without troubling
about similarity of position, thus obtaining a sort of ragged fascine,
whose sticks project on every side. Such is the bastion of the child
grub, an excellent system of defense, with its continuous pile of
spikes, but difficult to steer through the tangle of aquatic plants.

Sooner or later, the worm forsakes this kind of caltrop which catches on
to everything. It was a basket maker, it now turns carpenter; it builds
with little beams and joists--that is to say, with round bits of
wood, browned by the water, often as wide as a thick straw and a
finger's-breadth long, more or less--taking them as chance supplies
them.

For the rest, there is something of everything in this rag bag: bits of
stubble, fag ends of rushes, scraps of plants, fragments of some tiny
twig or other, chips of wood, shreds of bark, largish grains, especially
the seeds of the yellow iris, which were red when they fell from their
capsules and are now black as jet.

The heterogeneous collection is piled up anyhow. Some pieces are fixed
lengthwise, others across, others aslant. There are angles in this
direction and angles in the other, resulting in sharp little turns and
twists; the big is mixed with the little, the correct rubs
shoulders with the shapeless. It is not an edifice, it is a frenzied
conglomeration. Sometimes, a fine disorder is an effect of art. This
is not so here: the work of the Caddis worm is not a masterpiece worth
signing.

And this mad heaping up follows straight upon the regular basket work
of the start. The young grub's fascine did not lack a certa