and flies off to
collect balls of dirt. With these she fills up the tunnel completely.
Carefully she puts the little round door on. One day some one saw her do
a curious thing. She wished to be very sure that the door was fast shut.
Perhaps it did not fit well. So she found a tiny pebble, held it in her
jaws, and hammered the door down with it. Wasn't that a clever thing for
a wasp to do? The door closed, this is all the attention she gives to
baby digger-wasps. She has put in plenty of food, even for the hungriest
larva. Now it must look out for itself, eat, grow fat and strong, and
then dig its way out into the salt-marsh.

"Mrs. Eumenes is a good-looking little wasp dressed in black and yellow.
She is a mason, making a pretty mud vase for a home. The clay, or mud,
she moistens, then moulds it, little by little, into the vase, which she
fastens on to a twig. Some mud-daubers make small cylinders placed side
by side. Into these they put stung spiders, after tearing off their legs
to make sure they will not recover and run away before the eggs hatch.
Sometimes the mud-daubers plaster up the keyholes in a house, and so
have snug homes.

"One day last summer, as I was sitting outside my cabin, I noticed a
wasp carrying something green in its mouth. It came close to my head,
then finally crawled up under the shingles on the side wall. All the
afternoon it came and went, each time bringing something green. The next
afternoon I was loading my guns, and had put a hollow gun-barrel on a
table at my side. Soon I heard a whir of insect wings, and there, on the
table, was my wasp friend. It walked up and down, examining very
carefully the hollow barrel, then cautiously it crawled in. In about
five minutes it crawled out again and flew away. Soon it was back with a
piece of green in its mouth. It crawled into the barrel and left the
green. Six times the wasp did this; then my curiosity became so great I
could wait no longer. When she flew away I tapped the barrel on the
table and emptied out six little green worms, all limp and still. But
Mrs. Wasp was back again, and I guiltily withdrew. She had brought the
seventh worm, and when she saw the six lying on the table she was much
puzzled. She went around and poked each one to see whether it was limp,
fearing, perhaps, that she had not stung them hard enough; but, finding
them helpless, she picked them up one by one and patiently carried them
back into the gun-barrel. Three times I