"Oh, let us hear—let us hear! We have heard nothing equal to this yet."
"Well, then, I begin by telling you that these insects are very common in Africa, and in the East Indies, and are troublesome enough, for they eat almost every thing but metal and glass. They love wood, though, better than any thing else; and they are so numerous that they destroy it wonderfully fast. They are very cunning, too; they never eat the outside of the wood first, but will work upon the inside, so as to leave the outer part not thicker than a piece of pasteboard. But the curious things I meant to tell you were about their city; so I will go on to that. When they first begin to build you will see little hills shaped like a sugar-loaf, and rising up above the ground about a foot, or a little more. Here is a picture of them.
The highest of these little hills is always in the middle; and they go on building more and more, and making them all higher, still keeping the tallest one in the centre. When they have made them as high as they wish, then they fill in the spaces between the tops of all these sugar-loaf hills, so as to make one roof over all. Here is a picture of one finished.
After this is done, they take down nearly all of the little sugar-loaf hills inside; for they only wanted them for a scaffold to support the top while they were building it."
"Uncle Philip, what is all this built of?"
"It is built of clay, which the ant makes almost as hard as stone."