“Well, once there was Little Ant Red and Big Ant Black lived neighbors.”
“Whose aunts were they—each other's?” inquired the boy.
“They wasn't your father's or mother's sisters; they was antymires,” explained Zene.
“Oh,” said Robert Day.
“Ant Red, she was a little bit of a thing; you could just see her. But Ant Black, she was a great big critter that went like a train of cars when she was a mind to.”
“I don't like either kind,” said Robert. “The little ones got into our sugar once, and Grandma had to fight 'em out with camphor, and a big black got into my mouth and I bit him in two. He pinched my tongue awful, and he tasted sour.”
“Big Ant Black,” continued Zene, “she lived in a hill by a stump, but Little Ant Red she lived on a leaf up a tree.”
“I thought they always crept into houses,” urged Bobaday.
“This one didn't. She lived on a leaf up a tree. And these two ants run against each other in everything. When they met in the grass they'd stand up on their hind feet and shake hands as friendly as you please, but as soon as their backs was turned they'd talk! Big Ant Black said Little Ant Red was always a meddling, and everybody knowed her son was drowned in under the orchard cider-press where his mother sent him to snuff round. And Little Ant Red she used to tell how Ant Black was so graspin' she tried to carry that cider-press off and hide it in her hole.
“They had all the neighbors takin' sides. There was a yellow-back spider. He took up for Ant Red; he hoped to get a taste of her, and Ant Black he knowed was big enough to bite him unless he was mighty soople in wrappin' the web around her. Every mornin' when the dew stood in beads on his net he told Ant Red they was tears he shed about her troubles, and she run up and down and all around, talkin' like a sawmill, but keepin' just off the web. And there was Old Grasshopper, he sided with Ant Red, and so did Miss Green Katydid. But all the beetles, and them bugs that lived under the bark of the old stump, they took up for Ant Black, 'cause she was handy. And the snake-feeder was on her side.