hat with whose manufacture and employment we
are already familiar.

Discouraged by a food which does not suit them and perhaps also tried
by a season of exceptional drouth, my young potters soon relinquish
their task; they die after adding a shallow rim to their pots.

Only the Long-legged Clythra thrives and repays me amply for my
troublesome nursing. I provide it with chips of old bark taken from
the first tree to hand, the oak, the olive, the fig-tree and many
others. I soften them by steeping them for a short time in water. The
cork-like crusts, however, are not what my boarders eat. The actual
food, the butter on the bread, is on the surface. There is a little
here of all that the first beginnings of vegetable life add to old
tree-trunks, all that breaks up decrepit age to turn it into perpetual
youth.

There are tufts of moss, hardly a twelfth of an inch in height, which
were sleeping droughtily under the merciless sun of the dog-days, but
which a bath in a glass of water awakens at once. They now display
their ring of green leaflets, brightened up and restored to life for a
few hours. There are leprous efflorescences, with their white or
yellow dust; tiny lichens radiating in ash-grey straps and covered
with glaucous, white-edged shields, great round eyes that seem to gaze
from the depths of the limbo in which dead matter comes to life again.
There are collemas, which, after a shower, become dark and bloated and
shake like jellies; sphaerias, whose pustules stand out like ebony
teats, full of myriads of tiny sacs, each containing eight pretty
seeds. A glance through the microscope at the contents of one of these
teats, a speck only just visible to the eye, reveals an astounding
world: an infinity of procreative wealth in an atom. Ah, what a
beautiful thing life is, even on a chip of rotten bark no bigger than
a finger-nail! What a garden! What a treasure-house!

This is the best pasture put to the test. My Clythrae graze upon it,
gathering in dense herds at the most luxuriant spots. One would take
this heap for pinches of some brown, modelled seed or other, the
snapdragon's, for instance; but these particular seeds push and sway;
if one of them moves the least bit, the shells all clash together.
Others wander about, in search of a good place, staggering and
tumbling under the weight of the overcoat; they wander at random
through that great and spacious world, the bottom of my cup.

Not a fortnight has elaps