It was so sunny and warm this morning that we had given up chatting and were simply sitting or sprawling as comfortably as we could on the irregular top of our Aussichtsthurm. A few flying dragons, some in bronze-red mail, some in greenish blue, were wheeling about over the pond, and a meadow-lark kept up a most cheerful singing in the pasture nearby. It was really just the sort of day and place and feeling that Mary and I like best. We knew we ought, as persevering Nature students, to get down and poke around in the weeds and ooze of the edges of the pond so as to see things. But we didn't want to do it, and so we didn't. That is one perfectly beautiful thing about the way Mary and I study Nature. We don't when we don't want to.
But if we didn't climb down to the live things this day at Frenchman's Pond, they came up to us. One of the flying dragons actually swooped so close to our heads that we could hear its shining brittle wings crackle, and only a few minutes after, a curious delicate little creature with four gauzy wings, a pair of projecting eyes with a fixed stare, and three long hair-like tails on its body, lit on Mary's hand and walked slowly and rather totteringly up her bare wrist and fore arm. Then without any fluttering or struggling, it slowly fell over on one side and lay quite still. It was dead!
This rather took our breath away. We are only too well accustomed, unfortunately, to seeing death come to our little companions; they do not live long, at best, and then so many of them get killed and eaten. But they usually make some protest when Death approaches. They do not surrender their brief joy of living in such utterly unresisting way as this little creature did. But when I had got my spectacles properly adjusted, I saw what it was that had died so quietly and suddenly. The little gauzy-winged creature was a May-fly, or ephemera, and life with the May-flies is such a truly ephemeral thing, and death comes regularly so soon and so swiftly, and without any apparent illness or injury intervening between health and dissolution, that we naturalists have ceased to wonder at it. Although this is not because we understand it at all. Far from it. Indeed the death of any creature, except from obvious accident or wasting illness, is one of the mysteries of life. Which sounds rather Irish, but is just what I mean.
But Mary was looking thoughtfully at this dead little May-fly in her hand. It was so soft and delicate of body, had such frail and filmy wings, that it seemed that it must have been very ill-fitted to cope with the hard conditions of insect living, to escape the numerous insect-feeding creatures and to find food and shelter for itself, to be successful, in a word, in the "struggle for existence"! And in a way, this is quite true. But, in another way, it is not true. For the May-flies, in their flying stage, make up for their frailness and feebleness, their inability to feed—they have really no mouth-parts and do not eat at all in their few hours or days of flying life—by existing in enormous numbers, and millions may be killed, or may die from very feebleness, and yet there are enough left to lay the eggs necessary for a new generation, and that is success in life for them. Nothing else is necessary; their whole aim and achievement in life seems to be to lay eggs and start a new generation of May-flies.
I settled back into a still more comfortable position and said: "Did I ever tell you, Mary, of the May-flies' dance of death I saw in Lucerne once, not far from the old bridge across the Reuss with its famous pictures of our own dance of death? Well, then, we'll just about have time before the tower-clock calls us home. Do you want to hear about it?"
"Yes, please," said Mary.
"Well, I had been studying in a great university in an old German town all the spring and early summer and had come to Switzerland for my vacation. You know there are splendid mountains there—"
"The Alps," interrupted Mary. "The highest is Mt. Blanc, 15,730 feet above the sea."