BROKEN SLUMBER 433 



The sleep of the queen-wasp is by no means a half- 

 hearted affair. In pulling down an old cottage we have 

 found dozens of them. The walls were of double 

 boards, the space between packed with moss, and we 

 are told that they are uncommonly cosy walls. At 

 any rate, it is probable that the queen-wasps have 

 slept in the moss for nearly two hundred years past. 

 When we found them in October they were crawly 

 things, and sometimes they whirred their wirlgs and 

 gave out a sleepy, whispered buzz, but those that we 

 find now are so stiff in sleep that we cannot move 

 their legs for fear of breaking them. It is like a 

 miracle when the warmth of the fire pours life into 

 these brittle things and makes them " bizz," and even 

 get on the wing to fly away. The armoured wasp and 

 the softer tortoise-shell butterfly are true children of 

 the sun. Its absence, even its semi-absence in the 

 long twilight of the year, means complete sleep, and 

 it is only when the hibernaculum has been chosen in 

 a spot afterwards warmed by an artificial fire that they 

 inspire newspaper paragraphs by coming abroad in 

 the season of no flowers. Still more soundly sleep the 

 humble-bees, because they always choose wilder spots 

 to lay up in. We never see them again till their 

 appointed time. They sleep so soundly that they can 

 never know if the shrew-mouse finds them and eats 

 them with keen gratitude for the shrew-mouse that 

 seems to vanish with the harvest, and in the more 

 decided Continental winter does vanish, is given to a 

 sort of somnambulance in this country. 



Only the dormouse of all that ilk really sleeps in 

 our climate. Even he sleeps with a store handy, and 

 almost certainly takes a meal in his sleep. The voles, 

 28 



