I. Little Granaries under the Ground
I was going to begin by saying that one of the most fore-handed of them all has six feet, but as that would be almost as bad as a pun, I decided not to. You would have known, of course, that by people with six feet I meant the insects.
[ANTS THAT THRESH AND STORE]
Among the six-legged farmers, you may be sure, there have always been many who took thought for the morrow—the ants, for example. One can believe almost anything of ants. If that sluggard had gone to the ant, as wise King Solomon told him to, and learned all their ways, he would have found, among other things, how one species harvests the seeds of the plant known as the "shepherd's-purse," by twisting off the pods with its hind legs. These members of the ant family store grains of oats, nettle, and other plants. They pick up all the seeds they can find that the Autumn winds have already threshed for them, but they're not the least like that lazy man who wouldn't have the corn that was offered by kind neighbors to keep him from starving, because it wasn't shelled. If they don't find enough seeds on the ground when it comes time to think about the Winter stores they climb up and gather in the seeds themselves. On the shepherd's-purse, for example, the ant climbs up, selects a well-filled pod which is not sufficiently dried to have had its seeds threshed out by the winds, takes the pod in its little jaws and then—watch him—turns round and round on his hind legs until he twists it off! Then with it he carefully moves down the stem, like a baggageman carrying a big trunk from the third apartment; only the baggageman carries the trunk in front of him or on his shoulders, while the ant backs his way down. Sometimes two ants work together, one twisting, the other cutting away the fibres with its teeth. Sometimes they drop the pods to companions waiting below, and these other helpers never run off with it, but carry it to the common granary; for ants always play fair.
HOW THE ANTS WORK IN DIGGING OUT THEIR GRANARIES
And they have granaries, these ant farmers—hundreds of them, made just for that, each about the size of father's watch.
