the
trapper, I shall obtain no more than that, whereas I stand in need of
at least a dozen.

These ruses are very simple. To go in search of the sexton, who exists
only here and there in the country-side, would be nearly always a
waste of time; the favourable month, April, would be past before my
cage was suitably stocked. To run after him is to trust too much to
accident; so we will make him come to us by scattering in the orchard
an abundant collection of dead Moles. To this carrion, ripened by the
sun, the insect will not fail to hasten from the various points of the
horizon, so accomplished is he in detecting such a delicacy.

I make an arrangement with a gardener in the neighbourhood, who, two
or three times a week, makes up for the penury of my two acres of
stony ground by providing me with vegetables raised in a better soil.
I explain to him my urgent need of Moles in unlimited numbers.
Battling daily with trap and spade against the importunate excavator
who uproots his crops, he is in a better position than any one to
procure for me what I regard for the moment as more precious than his
bunches of asparagus or his white-heart cabbages.

The worthy man at first laughs at my request, being greatly surprised
by the importance which I attribute to the abhorrent animal, the
_Darboun_; but at last he consents, not without a suspicion at the
back of his mind that I am going to make myself a gorgeous winter
waist-coat with the soft, velvety skins of the Moles. A thing like
that must be good for pains in the back. Very well. We settle the
matter. The essential thing is that the _Darbouns_ reach me.

They reach me punctually, by twos, by threes, by fours, packed in a
few cabbage-leaves, at the bottom of the gardener's basket. The
excellent fellow who lent himself with such good grace to my strange
wishes will never guess how much comparative psychology will owe him!
In a few days I was the possessor of thirty Moles, which were
scattered here and there, as they reached me, in bare spots of the
orchard, among the rosemary-bushes, the strawberry-trees and the
lavender-beds.

Now it only remained to wait and to examine, several times a day, the
under-side of my little corpses, a disgusting task which any one would
avoid whose veins were not filled with the sacred fire of enthusiasm.
Only little Paul, of all the household, lent me the aid of his nimble
hand to seize the fugitives. I have already said that the entomologi