[THE ORANGE-DWELLERS]
An entire colony of those strange little people, the Orange-dwellers, were killed in our town yesterday morning. And not a newspaper reporter found it out! Just one of the Orange-dwellers escaped, and as Mary and I were the means of saving his life, and are taking care of him as well as we can (Mary has him now on a small piece of orange-rind in a pill box), he has told us the story of his life and something about the other orange-dwelling people. Some of the Orange-dwellers live in Mexico; some live in Florida, and some in California; in fact they are to be found wherever oranges grow. Of course, you have guessed already that the Orange-dwellers are not human beings; they are not really people; they are insects.
The name of the Orange-dweller we had saved, and with whom we became very well acquainted, is so long and strange that I shall tell you merely his nickname, which is Citrinus. The oranges on which Citrinus and a great many of his brothers and sisters and cousins lived grew in Mexico, and when these oranges were ripe, they were gathered and packed into boxes and sent to our town. Imagine if you can the fearful strangeness of it! To have one's world plucked from its place in space, wrapped up in tissue-paper, and packed into a great box with a lot of other worlds; then sent off through space to some other place where enormous giants were waiting impatiently for breakfast! When Citrinus's world reached our town, one of these giants, who is my brother, took it up, and saying, "See, what a specked orange," straightway began unwittingly to kill all of the Orange-dwellers on it by vigorously rubbing and scraping it. For Citrinus and his companions were the specks! That is all an Orange-dweller seems to be when carelessly looked at; simply a little circular, scale-like, blackish or reddish-brown speck on the shining surface of the orange, his world. You can find the Orange-dwellers almost any morning at breakfast.
When my brother began to scrape off the specks, I hastily interfered, but only in time to save one of the little people, Citrinus, whom, as I have said, Mary has since faithfully cared for. He will soon die, however, for he has lived already nearly three months, and that is a ripe age for an Orange-dweller. But he has had time enough to tell me a great deal about his life, and as it is such a curious story, and is undoubtedly true, I venture to repeat it here to you. As a matter of fact I must confess—still Mary says that of course Citrinus can talk, because he talks with other Orange-dwellers later in the story, and so of course can talk to us now.
Citrinus has lived for almost his whole life on the orange on which we found him. His mother lived on one of the fragrant leaves of the tree on which the orange grew. She was, as Citrinus is now, simply a reddish-brown circular speck on the bright-green orange-leaf; and because she couldn't walk, she had to get all her food in a peculiar way. She had a long (that is, long for such a tiny creature), slender, pointed hollow beak or sucking-tube, which she thrust right into the tender orange-leaf, and through which she sucked up the rich sap or juice which kept flowing into the leaf from the twig it hung on. She had thus a constant supply of food always ready and convenient; whenever she was hungry she simply sucked orange-sap into her mouth until she was satisfied. This is the way all the Orange-dwellers get their food, the very youngest of the family being able to take care of itself from the day of its birth. They never taste any other kind of food but the juice from the leaf or twig or golden orange on which they live.