CHAPTER XLVII 



THE JUNE-BUG 



IT is a discovery of no small importance in your 

 eyes, my young friends, when you find the first 

 June-bug of the season on the young foliage. In the 

 evening you get together in a corner and talk about 

 it, you make plans for the morrow, 

 and all your conversation is about 

 the June-bug that has just arrived. 

 You arrange to get up early the 

 next day and shake the trees in 

 order to bring down the sleeping 

 insects ; you get ready a box, 

 pierced with holes, to receive the 

 captives, and put in a handful of 

 fresh leaves for them to feed on. 



"At the first streak of dawn 

 you are up; you visit the willows, 

 the poplars, the hawthorn hedges wet with dew. 

 It is a fruitful hunt: the June-bugs, benumbed 

 by the chill of night, fall like hail when you shake 

 the branches. Soon you have a half a score of 

 them, then a dozen, then twenty. It is enough. You 

 go back to the house with your prisoners fluttering 

 and struggling in the foot of an old stocking, in your 



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June-bug 



