Even in the time of the Greeks, the insect was called the divine, the prophet. The tiller of the soil is not particular about analogies: Where points of resemblance are not too clear, he will make up for their deficiencies. He saw on the sun-scorched herbage an insect of imposing appearance, drawn up majestically in a half-erect posture. He noticed its gossamer wings, broad and green, trailing like long veils of finest lawn; he saw its forelegs, its arms so to speak, raised to the sky in a gesture of invocation. That was enough; popular imagination did the rest; and behold the bushes from ancient times stocked with Delphic priestesses, with nuns in orison.

Good people, with your childish simplicity, how great was your mistake! Those sanctimonious airs are a mask for Satanic habits; those arms folded in prayer are cutthroat weapons: they tell no beads, they slay whatever passes within range. Forming an exception which one would never have suspected in the herbivorous order of the Orthoptera, the Mantis feeds exclusively on living prey. She is the tigress of the peaceable entomological tribes, the ogress in ambush who levies a tribute of fresh meat. Picture her with sufficient strength; and her carnivorous appetites, combined with her traps of horrible perfection, would make her the terror of the countryside. The Prego-Dieu would become a devilish vampire.

When we bought the evergreens to put in front of the house and in the woods in back, the man gave me a little bowl of plants. I wanted to put a little figure in there, so we went to a flower shop, and Mommy and I picked a little pixie kneeling down with his hands folded in prayer. We put him in his little home in the bowl and set him on the kitchen windowsill, so we could see him every morning.

On Friday October 13, two days before Mommy's wedding anniversary, she was making tea for me while I lay in the bedroom. She looked over at the pixie, and she let out a little scream. The pixie had turned red on his cheeks and the tips of his ears and on the top of his hands, folded in prayer. The red was so crimson, it was like blood. He looked very pretty with the red cheeks and red-tipped ears and red knuckles, as though he was praying out in the frost, and the frost had nipped him as though Jack Frost had painted him.

Mommy could never understand how he could have suddenly become so beautifully tinted. The color gradually deepened form a deep crimson to the very deepest blood-red in three days' time, on Sunday October 15, and then stayed like that. She wrote to the company, who wrote her a letter about splotches that had formed "in a few isolated cases" in their pixies' faces, but the color on our pixie was not splotched, but very evenly placed, as natural as can be, and the hands were deep blood-red where they were clasped in prayer as though they were being wrung hard.

When I went back for the last time at the end of October, Halloween time, we took out little pixie with us. I held him to remind me to pray, and Mommy called me "Little Lamb of God."

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