—Emily Dickinson.
THE ANTS’ MONDAY DINNER
How did I know what the ants had for dinner last Monday? It is odd that I should have known, but I’ll tell you how it happened.
I was sitting under a big pine tree, high up on a hillside. The hillside was more than seven thousand feet above the sea, and that is higher than many mountains which people travel hundreds of miles to look at. But this hillside was in Colorado, so there was nothing wonderful in being up so high.
I had been watching the great mountains with snow on them, and the great forests of pine trees—miles and miles of them—so close together that it looks as if you could lie down on their tops and not fall through; and my eyes were tired with looking at such great, grand things, so many miles off.
So I looked down on the ground where I was sitting, and watched the ants which were running about everywhere, as busy and restless as if they had the whole world on their shoulders.
Suddenly I saw a tiny caterpillar, which seemed to be bounding along in a very strange way. In a second more I saw an ant seize hold of him and begin to drag him off.