“There are a number of them right in this meadow, though you would never think it, to look at them. They are not at all like me. See that white froth clinging to those grass stems? A cousin made that. Of the sap of the plant too. If you look, you will find her in the midst of it. She is green and speckled and very small. Then there are the tree hoppers, as funny in shape as brownies, and the leaf hoppers. They are all my cousins. The aphides too. Of course you know the aphides?”
“I believe they were the things Mrs. Lacewing told me I should learn about later,” said Ruth, with sudden remembrance.
“Very likely. Mrs. Lacewing’s children should know about them. The aphides are very bad, though they are so very tiny. But what they lack in size they make up in numbers. Really there are millions of them. They are not travellers, either, but stay just where they are hatched, and suck, suck, suck. In that way they kill many plants, for it is the sap of the plant, its life juice, which serves them for food. They eat so much of this that their bodies can’t hold it all, and what they don’t need is given off as honey dew. The ants like this honey so well that to get it they take good care of the aphides. But there are some aphides which do not give off honey dew. Do you see this white stuff on the alder bushes?”
“Yes. I’ve often seen it before, too. It looks like soft white fringe.”
“Well, it isn’t. It is a lot of aphides, each with a tuft of wool on its body, and a beak fast stuck in the alder stem.”
They had now reached the pond, which lay smiling in the sunshine.
“It would be so pretty,” said Ruth, throwing herself down on the grass, “if it wasn’t for the horrid, green, oozy stuff all over it.”
“Horrid, green, oozy stuff?” repeated the cicada. “Child, you don’t know what you are talking about. That green stuff is made up of tiny green plants more than you could count. Each has a rootlet hanging down like a silver thread and leaves almost too small to be called so. They are green though and they do the mighty work of all green leaves, for, besides shading the pond world from the hot rays of the sun, they make for the many inhabitants the life-giving oxygen without which they would die. And I want to tell you something more: In that duckweed—for what you call green, oozy stuff is duckweed—there are millions of tiny living things too small to be seen by the eye except with the aid of a microscope.”
Ruth looked quite as astonished as the cicada meant she should be.
“You have a great deal to learn, I assure you. Maybe you haven’t thought of the pond as a world, but just see what a busy place it is.”