294 THE CANADIAN ENTOMOLOGIST 



aware, on all sides, of tiny rustlings in the foliage, prelude to the 

 drowsy hum and blundering flight of shard-borne beetles; a sound 

 familiar enough, and one that should have surely set me down 

 not more than two or three years or 100 miles away — in the school 

 playground, say, Port Hope, at the height of the June-bug season; 

 but there must have been something peculiar in the keynote of 

 this symphony, for it set vibrating a far more distant chord of 

 memory: a little tilt between the mind's deft fingers, one magic 

 turn of the kaleidoscope we call imagination, and on the instant 

 I found myself a schoolboy in a narrow Kentish lane between 

 chestnut trees and hawthorns, watching at dusk for cockchafers 

 and the occasional prize of a stagbeetle soaring out of the hedge- 

 row. I had no net with me, and though I could tell the beetles 

 were larger than June bugs, capture was out of the question, =o 

 I turned in for the night. 



Next day I was heading towards the Heights before 6 a.m. 

 For some time I stuck to the main road, for the dew was very 

 heavy; but near the Monument Station I sensed unfiiistakably 

 the neighborhood of a certain fungus, and following my nose like a 

 questing hound, presently spied, by a clump of red cedar, a small 

 colony of what Iwas in search of — Ithyphallus impudicus — "Stink- 

 horns, "to use the vulgar and all too expressive name. Two 

 of the horns, already sinking into putrescence, were tenanted 

 by nearly a score of silphids, dark-winged and with reddish margin 

 on the thorax. 



From here, as it was too early for the car-service, I tramped 

 up the belt railway towards the Glen; the sides of the track showed 

 plenty of New Jersey Tea, but it was too soon in the day for insect 

 visitors; on some plants of purple vetch I found great numbers 

 of "the old-fashioned Potato-beetle" {Macrobasis unicolor) feed- 

 ing; and a couple of miles further up, when I was within a few 

 rods of the Glen enclosure, it being after seven o'clock, with the 

 sun hot and strong in its course, came gliding out towards me from 

 the shrubbery that fringed the lip of the gorge, a magnificent 

 yellow-banded snake, larger and stouter than any garter snake 

 r had ever seen before; forward he drove with that wonderful 

 motion that, unaided by limbs, yet rivals in grace and mastery 

 of self-control the most perfect athlete's — rigidity and suppleness 



