A LIVING MARTYRDOM. 293 



times nearly three a length extreme, as longer than the 

 body, but not superfluous, seeing that its office is often to 

 penetrate, and that through a barrier of clay, down to the 

 very bottom of deep nest-holes in walls or sand-banks, those, 

 usually, of the mason wasp, wherein, to the destruction of the 

 hapless nestling, its rightful occupant, it leaves behind the fatal 

 deposit of a parasitic egg. 



Let us see now though no very pleasant thing to look 

 upon or think of the way in which the ichneumon often 

 goes to work upon a poor devoted devourer of the leaves 

 of cabbage, one of the commonest of all caterpillars, whence 

 spring one of the commonest of all butterflies the Large 

 White l of the garden. 



While stuffing its variegated doublet of green, black, and yel- 

 low, with vegetable pulp, a small ichneumon, a little four-winged 

 imp, with black body and yellow legs, pounces on its back, 

 flourishes her tremendous egg-inserting weapon, and, seeking 

 therewith the caterpillar's most vulnerable part, plunges it, 

 now here, now there, between its rings, leaving, with every 

 puncture, a " thorn in the flesh," soon to be the living prey 

 of a brood of devourers. 



The victim of this infliction bears all with a most asto- 

 nishing degree of quietude ; and, without any outward signs 

 of the visitation which has befallen it, continues to discuss 

 its cabbage with apparently the same relish as before, and 

 utterly unconscious that, while seeming only to feed itself, it 

 is in reality supporting the surreptitious progeny which Mother 

 Ichneumon has so cunningly committed to its most involuntary 

 keeping. 



Thus strangely supported, the infant or grub cuckoo-flies 

 attain their growth, and so, to all appearance, does their un- 

 fortunate fosterer, the caterpillar. According to instinctive 

 custom, the latter, then deserting its cabbage, betakes 



1 Pontia Bmssicce. 



F F 



