“Very well, then, don’t interrupt me again. As I was saying, Tithonus loved Aurora, and every morning he would lie in the meadow and wait for her coming. Then the fair goddess would give him her sweetest smiles. But one day Tithonus grew pale and ill, and all the love of Aurora could not make him well again. ‘Alas!’ he cried, ‘I am mortal, and I must die.’ ‘Nay,’ answered Aurora, ‘you shall not die, for I will win for you the gift of the gods.’ And, speeding to the mighty Jupiter, she begged that Tithonus might be as a god, and live forever. So for a while they were happy together, but as the years passed Tithonus grew old and bent, for Aurora had forgotten to ask that he might always be young. Grieving much, Tithonus lay under the shadow of the trees and sighed through the long days.”
“‘Ah, my Tithonus,’ whispered Aurora, ‘I love you too well to see you thus unhappy. No more shall you be sad or bend beneath an old man’s weakness, but, as a child of the meadow, happy and free, you shall sing and dance through the golden hours.’ In that moment Tithonus became a grasshopper, and ever since then his descendants have danced and sung in the sunshine. That’s the end of the story. I might have made it twice as long, but Summer is so short, and I want to dance.”
“It was a very nice story,” said Ruth, “but do you really dance?”
“Of course, our kind of dancing.”
“But don’t you do lots of other things too?”
“Yes; we give concerts, and we eat. We are hatched with big appetites, and a strong pair of jaws, and we start right in to use them on the tender grasses around us. We only follow our instincts, though men call it doing damage. You eat, don’t you?”
“Why, yes, but I don’t eat grass, you know.”
“Because it isn’t your food. You see it’s this way: In the kingdom of nature all creatures have a certain work to do, and each is exactly fitted for its place, for all are governed by laws more wonderful than any man has made. Not that I wish to speak lightly of man, he is good enough in his place, but he is apt to think himself the whole thing, and he isn’t. Maybe he doesn’t know that for every human creature on earth there are millions of plants and animals.”
“Oh,” said Ruth, “really and truly?”
“Really and truly. You couldn’t begin to count them, and do you know, if the earth was to grow quite bare, with only one living plant left on it, the seeds from that one plant could make it green again in a very few years. But if certain insects were left without other creatures to eat and keep them down, the poor old earth would soon be bare once more. So you see there must be laws to fix all these things. Nature balances one set of creatures against the other, so there will not be too many of any kind.”