220 
LITTLE FOLKS 
perfectly clean themselves. Their coat is as shiny, and their legs 
as smooth and clean as though they lived in cotton and fed on 
honey. 
The little fellow, whose life is pictured here, has a very large 
name — the Tiger Beetle. But he fully deserves it, for innocent and 
harmless as he looks, he is one of the fiercest and most cruel of 
Beetles. 
He begins life — like the rest of the Beetles — a fat grub, 
about half an inch long. He is by no means a beauty, having a 
broad flat head, and a pair of hooks on the back, by means of 
which he climbs up his curious house. His house itself is merely 
a deep hole in the ground, which the grub makes for itself, in this 
way. With his jaws and fore legs he digs a little earth and piles it 
on his flat head. He then climbs to his door, and throws the dirt 
off. He sometimes makes his hole a foot deep. 
When he is- hungry — and he generally is hungry — he climbs to 
the door of his house, fixes his two hooks in the side so that he 
can't fall, and there waits with open mouth for some unwary insect 
to come along, as you see in the picture. When he succeeds in 
seizing one, he retires to the bottom of the hole to eat him. Nat- 
uralists find it very hard to catch this fierce little grub, for the 
moment he is disturbed he drops to the bottom of the house, and 
s ays there till he thinks he is safe. There is one way of getting 
him out, however. If a straw or small stick is thrust down the 
hole, he will attack it at once, and hold on to it till he is fairly 
dragged out of his house. 
