of living creatures, and death is always our affair. This bit, I admit, is bordering on mysticism. I’m sorry, because I don’t like mysticism. It has no trousers and no trousers seat: n’a pas de quoi. And I should feel so uncomfortable if I put my hand behind me and felt an absolute blank.

Meanwhile a long, thin, brown caterpillar keeps on pretending to be a dead thin beech-twig, on a little bough at my feet. He had got his hind feet and his fore feet on the twig, and his body looped up like an arch in the air between, when a fly walked up the twig and began to mount the arch of the imitator, not having the least idea that it was on a gentleman’s coat-tails. The caterpillar shook his stern, and the fly made off as if it had seen a ghost. The dead twig and the live twig now remain equally motionless,