The Mason-Wasps 



generation to generation. As a matter of 

 fact, though this Wasp is fairly com- 

 mon in my village, her dwellings are 

 nearly always scattered one by one, 

 with no traces of any old nests near 

 by. The place of her birth leaves no 

 lasting recollection in the nomad's memory; 

 and none comes to build beside the ruins of 

 the maternal home. 



For that matter, my want of success 

 might well be due to another cause. The 

 Pelopaeus certainly is not rare in our south- 

 ern towns; nevertheless she prefers the 

 peasant's smoky house to the townsman's 

 white villa. Nowhere have I seen her so 

 plentiful as in my village, with its tumble- 

 down cottages guiltless of rough-cast and 

 burnt yellow by the sun. My hermitage is 

 not quite so rustic as that: it is a little neater 

 and cleaner; and there is nothing to show 

 that my visitors did not forsake my kitchen 

 and my study, both too sumptuous in their 

 opinion, to go and settle somewhere near in 

 lodgings more to their taste. And so the 

 eagerly desired colonists, who were to have 

 peopled my workroom crammed with books, 

 plants, fossils and entomological cemeteries, 

 took their departure, scorning all that scien- 

 tific luxury; they went away in search of some 

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