"We had a great time with the ants at our house last summer," said Eliza Jones: "little mites of red things, you know, and they would get into the cake-chest and the sugar-bucket, and bothered ma so she had to keep all the sweet things on a table with its legs in basins of water. They couldn't get over that, you see."
"Why not?" Mollie asked. "Can't they swim?"
"Ours couldn't; lots of them fell in the water and were drowned."
"Ants are usually quite helpless in the water," Miss Ruth said, "though a French writer who has made the little folks a study, tells a story of six soldier ants who rescued their companions from drowning. He put his sugar-basin in a vessel of water, and several adventurous ants climbed to the ceiling and dropped into it. Four missed their aim and fell outside the bowl in the water. Their companions tried in vain to rescue them, then went away and presently returned accompanied by six grenadiers, stout fellows, who immediately swam to their relief, seized them with their pincers and brought them to land. Three were apparently dead, but the faithful fellows licked and rubbed them quite dry, rolling them over and over, stretching themselves on them, and in a truly skillful and scientific manner sought to bring back life to their benumbed bodies. Under this treatment three came to life, while one only partly restored was carefully borne away. 'I have seen it' is Du Pont de Nervours's comment on what he thinks may be considered a marvelous story, though it seems no more wonderful to me than many well-attested facts in the lives of the little people."
"It's all wonderful," Susie said. "It seems as though they must think and reason and plan just as we do. Don't you think so, Auntie?"
"Indeed I do, Susie. One who has long studied their ways ranks them next to man in the scale of intelligence, and says the brain of an ant—no larger perhaps than a fine grain of sand—must be the most wonderful particle of matter in the world."
"But they can't talk, Auntie?"
"I am not so sure of that. Their voices may be too fine and high-pitched for our great ears to hear. I fancy there is a deal of conversation carried on in the grass and the bushes and the trees, that we know nothing about."
"How funny! What did you mean, Auntie, when you said the queen laid off all her flounces and furbelows."
"I was rather fancifully describing her wings, dear, which she takes off herself when she enters the nest, having no further use for them. There are three kinds of ants in every nest: perfect males and females, and the workers. There are many different races of ants, from the great white ant of Africa—a terror to the natives, though in some respects his good friend—down to the little red-and-yellow meadow ants so common among us. The ants I have told you about, the Rufians and the Fuscans, are natives of America, and are found in New England. The big black ant so common here, sometimes called the jet ant, is a carpenter and a wood-carver. His great jaws bore through the hardest wood, and his pretty galleries and winding staircases penetrate through the beams and rafters of many an old mansion. Not long ago I accidentally killed a carpenter ant, and in a few minutes a comrade appeared who slowly, and apparently with great labor and fatigue, bore away the body. I felt as though I were looking on at a funeral.