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Putting both arms up behind her head she pulled it forward as if to tear it off, but was careful not to pull too hard, just enough to scrape away the dust; then, with her little hind legs, she stroked and dragged down her wing-sheaths, which sprang back in position looking beautifully bright and glossy.
I am not ashamed to confess that I cried over the loss of this poor little victim of overconfidence in human beings. I once procured a beetle with red stripes across its wing-sheaths, and trained it to show some degree of intelligence. This was for months the sole companion of my solitude, but it was at last discovered in my possession and taken away.
As he sat there, a little brown man with slightly curtailed wing-sheaths and a breastplate that looked like a head too large for its body, Maya thought he was almost comical; but she knew he was a dangerous beetle who could do immense harm to the mighty trees of the forest, and if his tribe attacked a tree in numbers then the green needles were doomed, the tree would turn sear and die.
Are the wing-sheaths and the triangular winglets of the larva the moulds whose folds, wrinkles, and sinuosities form their contents in their own image, and so weave the network of the future wings and wing-covers? Were they really moulds we might for a moment be satisfied. We might tell ourselves: It is quite a simple matter that the thing moulded should conform to the cavity of the mould.
But the tiny round fragments made such a bright, lively glitter in the grass, and ran down the blades in such twinkling, sparkling little drops like diamonds in the lamplight, that she was reassured. She turned towards the inside of the calix. A beetle, a little smaller than herself, with brown wing-sheaths and a black breastplate, was sitting at the entrance.
These heads could be linked one in the other, when the chain needed to be fastened. The scarabaeus pendant to this chain is incrusted upon the shoulder and wing-sheaths with blue glass paste rayed with gold, the legs and body being in massive gold.
"They are horns which you mistake for jaws; but their arrangement quite excuses your error. Look; the upper part of their body is black and polished, and their wing-sheaths are a greenish gray, irregularly dotted with dark spots." "Here is one which has no horns." "It is a female."
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