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as a clean dried specimen; for this is an _agalena_ spider, which dispenses with the winding-sheet of the field species--_epeira_ and _argiope_. Last week a big bumble-bee-like fly paid me a visit and suddenly disappeared. To-day I find him dried and ready for the insect-pin and the cabinet on the window-sill beneath the web, which affords at all times its liberal entomological assortment--Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Diptera, and Lepidoptera. Many are the rare specimens which I have picked from these charnel remnants of my spider net. Ah, hark! The talking "robber-fly" (_Asilus_), with his nasal, twangy buzz! "_Waiow!_ Wha-a-ar are ye?" he seems to say, and with a suggestive onslaught against the window-pane, which betokens his satisfied quest, is out again at the window with a bluebottle-fly in the clutch of his powerful legs, or perhaps impaled on his horny beak. Solitude! Not here. Amid such continual distraction and entertainment concentration on the immediate task in hand is not always of easy accomplishment. [Illustration] Last week, after a somewhat distracted morning with some queer beguiling little harlequins on the bittersweet-vine about my porch, of which I have previously written, I had finally settled down to my work, and was engaged in putting the finishing touches upon a long-delayed drawing, when a new visitor claimed my attention--a small hornet, which alights upon the window-sill within half a yard from my face. To be sure, she was no stranger here at my studio--even now there are two of her yonder beneath the spider-nest--and was, moreover, an old friend, whose ways were perfectly familiar to me; but this time the insect engaged my particular attention because it was not alone, being accompanied by a green caterpillar bigger than herself, which she held beneath her body as she travelled along on the window-sill so near my face. "So, so! my little wren-wasp, you have found a satisfactory cranny at last, and have made yourself at home. I have seen you prying about here for a week and wondered where you would take up your abode." The insect now reaches the edge of the sill, and, taking a fresh grip on her burden, starts off in a bee-line across my drawing-board and towards the open door, and disappears. Wondering what her whimsical destination might be, my eye involuntarily began to wander about the room in quest of nail-holes or other available similar crannies, but without reward, and I had fa
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