stick. In a no less expressive fashion, the Provencal peasant
calls it lou portofais, lou porto-caneu. This is the little grub
that carries through the still waters a faggot of tiny fragments
fallen from the reeds.

Its sheath, a travelling house, is a composite and barbaric piece
of work, a megalithic pile wherein art, retires in favor of
amorphous strength. The materials are many and sundry, so much so
that we might imagine that we had the work of dissimilar builders
before our eyes, if frequent transitions did not tell us the
contrary.

With the young ones, the novices, it starts with a sort of deep
basket in rustic wicker-work. The twigs employed present nearly
always the same characteristics and are none other than bits of
small, stiff roots, long steeped and peeled under water. The grub
that has made a find of these fibers saws them with its mandibles
and cuts them into little straight sticks, which it fixes one by
one to the edge of its basket, always crosswise, perpendicular to
the axis of the work.

Picture a circle surrounded by a bristling mass of tangents, or
rather a polygon with its sides extended in all directions. On
this assemblage of straight lines we place repeated layers of
others, without troubling about similarity of position, thus
obtaining a sort of ragged fascine, whose sticks project on every
side. Such is the bastion of the child grub, an excellent system
of defense, with its continuous pile of spikes, but difficult to
steer through the tangle of aquatic plants.