American Nature Series

Group V. Diversions from Nature

INSECT STORIES

BY

VERNON L. KELLOGG

With Illustrations

BY

Mary Wellman, Maud Lanktree, and Sekko Shimada

NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1908

Copyright, 1908,
BY

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

Published June, 1908

ROBERT DRUMMOND COMPANY, PRINTERS, NEW YORK

TO
DOROTHY S., ANNA F., AND MARY L.
WHO ARE MARY

PREFATORY NOTE

In these days many strange, true stories about animals are being written and read, but it seems to me that some of our most intimate and interesting animal companions are being overlooked. So I have tried to write about a few of them. These stories are true. I know this, for Mary and I have really seen almost everything I have told; and they seem to us strange. If there have slipped into the stories occasional slight attempts to show some reason for the strange things or to point an unobtrusive moral, it is because the teacher's habit has overcome the story-teller's intention. So the slips may be pardoned.

Of course I recognize that it is taking great chances nowadays with one's reputation for honesty and truth-telling to write or tell stories about animal behavior. Nature writers seem to be held, as a class, not to be above suspicion. But is a truthful man to be kept silent by criticism or abuse, or, on the other hand, is he to surrender, even for cash, to bad examples? I call out, "No!" and beat on the table as I say this until the pens and paper hop, and Mary asks, "No what?" Which reminds me that I must make some exception to my sweeping declaration of the truth of the whole of this little book. I am not responsible for Mary! She is, bless her, a child of dreams, and sometimes her dreams get into her talk. So some of Mary in this book is fancy; but the beasties and their doings are—I say it again—true, quite true.

V. L. K.

Stanford University, California.

LIST OF STORIES

[A NARROW-WAISTED MOTHER]
[RED AND BLACK AGAINST WHITE]
[THE VENDETTA]
[THE TRUE STORY OF THE PIT OF MORROWBIE JUKES]
[ARGIOPE OF THE SILVER SHIELD]
[THE ORANGE-DWELLERS]
[THE DRAGON OF LAGUNITA]
[A SUMMER INVASION]
[A CLEVER LITTLE BROWN ANT]
[AN HOUR OF LIVING; OR, THE DANCE OF DEATH]
[IN FUZZY'S GLASS HOUSE]
[ANIMATED HONEY-JARS]
[HOUSES OF OAK]

[A NARROW-WAISTED MOTHER]

I first got acquainted with Mary when she was collecting tarantula holes. This appealed to me strongly. It was so much more interesting than collecting postmarks or even postage-stamps.

It is part of my work, the part which is really my play—to go out and look at things. To do the same, I found out, is Mary's play—which is, of course, her most serious employment. We easily got acquainted when we first met, and made an arrangement to go out and look at things, and collect some of them, together. So after Mary had shown me that collecting tarantula holes is really quite simple—although at first thought of it you may not think so—I proposed to her to come along and help me collect a few wasp holes. They are smaller of course than tarantula holes and do not make quite such a fine showing when you get them home, but they have several real advantages over the spider burrows, only one of which I need tell you now. This one is, that you can watch the wasps make their holes because they do it in the daytime, while you can't watch the tarantula make its hole because it does it at night. So Mary and I went together to the place of the wasps.

I ought to tell you right away that Mary and I live in California. This explains to you partly why we are so happy in our rambles, because for any one whose work or whose play it is to go out and look at things, California is a wonderfully good place to live in. In fact, I know of none better. But I should tell you more of where we live, because California is so many places at once, that is, so many different kinds of places, such as high mountains, burning deserts, great forests, fertile plains, salt lakes, blue ocean, low soft hills, wide level marshes, fragrant orchards, brilliant flower gardens, hot springs and volcanic cones, deep cañons and rushing rivers,—O, indeed, almost all the kinds of places that the physical geography tells about.

Mary and I live in a beautiful valley between two ranges of mountains and very near the marsh-lined shores of a great ocean bay. Over beyond one range of mountains is the ocean itself stretching blue and ripply all the way to China, while beyond the other range of mountains is a desert with jackrabbits and burrowing owls and cactuses. Not the worst—or best—sort of desert like that far south toward Mexico, but one that gets a little rain, and hence is called a "Land of Great Possibilities" by men who sell pieces of it now and then to people from Maine.

It is easy for us to get from the little town in which we live to several very good places for looking at things. The foothills and mountain sides with their forests and coverts and swift little brooks; the orchards and flower gardens and grain and grass fields; the wide flat marshes with their salt-grass and pickle-weed, their wide channels and pools, and finally the bay itself; all are near by and all are fine places for observing and collecting things.

When I met Mary first—the time she was collecting tarantula holes—we were on the gentle slopes of the lower foothills of the mountains. The big hairy tarantulas are very numerous there, although one rarely sees them because they mostly stay in their holes in daytime. There are tarantula hawks there too, enormous black and rusty-red wasps with wings stretching three inches from tip to tip. Mary and I saw one of these giant wasps swoop down on a big tarantula just as he came out of his hole one evening after sundown, and that was a battle to remember, and it had a very strange ending. The tarantula—but I must save that battle for another chapter all to itself. I must try and stick to the wasp holes in this one.

It was a day in September. This month in California is the last one of the long, rainless, sun-filled summer, and everywhere it is very dry and brown. The valley floors and foothill slopes lie thirsty and cracking under the ardent sun, and a thin cover of fine dust lies on all the leaves of the live-oak and eucalyptus trees. Everything out of doors is waiting for the first rain. The birds are still and the frogs all hidden away. The insects buzz about rather heavily and keep pretty well under cover. If one wants to see much lowly life it is necessary to go to the banks of the few persisting streams or lakes or to the shores of bay or ocean. So Mary and I left the dry foothill slopes and their many silk-lined holes with a big black hairy tarantula sitting quietly at the bottom of each, and took the gently dropping dusty road to the marshes.

I like the salt marshes of California. They are a change and relief, in their soothing monotony and simple plant life, from the lush and variegated flower fields, the dense and hostile chaparral thickets, the dark forests of great trees, and the miles of artificial plantations of orchards and vines. On the marshes you are greater and more important than the plants. In an orchard or a giant-tree forest, you feel second-rate someway. The fruit-trees have men for servants, while to the giant trees with their outlook from a height of three hundred feet and their memories of two thousand years, a man is no more than an ant. But in the marshes you feel that you are much more important a kind of creature than the pickle-weed, and that is almost the only plant that grows there.

There are many curious little bare dry spots in the marshes where we know it. Flat, smooth, salt-encrusted, clean white spots rather circular in outline, and perhaps twenty feet in diameter. All around is the low thick growth of fat-leaved pickle-weed, but for some reason it doesn't invade these pretty little empty rooms. Mary and I like to lie on the clean dry floor of one of these unroofed rooms and look up at the blue sky and out beyond the low side walls of pickle-weed far across the flat marsh stretches, over the shining bay, and on through the quivering blue to the beautiful mountains that bound our views on both sides. On clear afternoons we can see a gleaming white speck on the top of the highest mountain in the eastern range. That is the famous Lick Observatory, where the astronomers are looking always into the sky to read the riddle of the stars and planets and comets. We feel rather small, Mary and I, when we realize that we are only loafing or at best watching insignificant little insects and collecting wasp holes that lie at our noses' ends, while those men up there are looking at wonders millions of miles away. But we are so interested and contented with our small doings and small wonders that we do not at all envy the astronomers on the mountain top. While they watch the conflagrations of the stars and the mighty sailing of the planets through the blackness of space, we watch the work and play and living of our lowly companions on the sun-flooded marshes. They like the cold glittering sky; we like the warm brown earth.

We had been lying quietly on the white salt sand in one of the unroofed marsh rooms for some time this September day before we saw the first wasp begin to work. She was standing on her head, apparently, and biting most energetically with her jaws, cutting a little circle in the salt crust. When she got the circle all cut, she tugged and buzzed until she dug up, unbroken, the little circular piece (perhaps one-third of an inch across) of crust. She dragged this about three inches away. Then she returned to the spot thus cleaned and dug out with her sharp jaws a bit or pellet of soil. Holding this in her mouth, she flew away about a foot and dropped it. Then came back. Then dug out another pellet of soil and carried and dropped it a foot or so away. Then back again and so on until it was plain that she was digging out a little cylindrical vertical hole or burrow. As the hole got deeper, the wasp had to crawl down into it, first with head and fore legs, then with head and half her body; finally her whole body, long legs, wings and all, was hidden as she dug deeper and deeper. She had to come out of the hole of course to carry away each bit of dug up soil. She always backed upward out of the burrow, and all the while she was digging she kept up a low humming sound. It was this humming sound that attracted our attention to other narrow-waisted wasps like the first one. By moving about cautiously and listening and looking carefully, we found more than a dozen others digging holes, each one going about the work just like every other one.

When our first wasp had made its hole deep enough—this took a pretty long time; we found out later that it was about three inches deep—she brought back the first little circular piece of salt crust and carefully put it over the top of the burrow, thus covering it up entirely and making it look as if no hole were there. Then she flew away, out of the little bare room and off into the pickle-weed somewhere. We waited several minutes but she didn't come back, so we turned our eyes to another wasp near by which had its hole only just begun. It was interesting to see how closely like the first wasp this second one worked. Prying and pulling with the jaws, the same fluttering of the wings and humming, the same backing out of the hole and the swift little flight for a foot or two feet away from the hole to drop the pellet of soil.

I tried to point out to Mary that this was the way animals do which work by instinct and not by reason. That all the animals of the same kind do things in the same way, and that they do them without any teaching or imitating or reasoning out. They are born with the knowledge and skill and the impulse to do the things in the particular way they do. But Mary found this very tiresome and let her eyes rove, and it is well she did or we might not have made our great discovery: a really thrilling discovery it was for us, too.

The first wasp had come back! But not empty handed, or rather not empty mouthed, for in her pointed jaws she held a limp measuring-worm about an inch and a quarter long. A measuring-worm or looper is the caterpillar of a certain kind of moth, and it loops or measures when it walks because it has no feet on the middle of the under side of the body as other caterpillars have, and so has to draw its tail pretty nearly up its head to take a step forward. This naturally makes its body rise up in a fold or loop. "See," cried Mary, "the wasp is going to put the measuring-worm into the hole."

That is exactly what happened. How the wasp could tell where the hole was, was surprising, for it had so carefully put the bit of salt crust in place that you couldn't tell the top of the hole from the rest of the crust-covered ground. But our wasp came straight to the right place. Perhaps as a carrier-pigeon comes to its loft from a hundred miles away, or a cat carried away in a bag to a strange place finds its way quickly back home.

Some of the other wasps that we watched later weren't so sure of their holes, though, and other people who have watched digger-wasps in other places have found them showing varying degrees of uncertainty about locating their nests. Mr. and Mrs. Peckham, who have studied the behavior of the various kinds of digger-wasps more than anybody else in this country, have concluded that the wasps "are guided in their movements by their memory of localities. They go from place to place quite readily because they are familiar with the details of the landscape in the district they inhabit. Fair eyesight and a moderately good memory on their part are all that need be assumed in this simple explanation of the problem."

But quite different from this conclusion is that of Fabre, the wonderful French observer of wasps, who experimented on them in regard to this matter of finding and knowing their holes, by carrying them away shut up in a dark box to the center of a village three kilometers from the nesting ground, and releasing them after being kept all night in the dark boxes. These wasps when released in the busy town, certainly a place never visited by them before, immediately mounted vertically to above the roofs and then instantly and energetically flew south, which was the direction of their holes. Nine separate wasps released one at a time did this without a moment's hesitation, and the next day Fabre found them all at work again at their hole-digging. He knew them by two spots of white paint he had put on each one.

"Are the wasps guided by memory when placed by man beyond their bearings and carried to great distances into regions with which they are unacquainted and in unknown directions?" asks Fabre. "By memory so quick that when, having reached a certain height at which they can in some sort take their bearings, they launch themselves with all their power of wing towards that part of the horizon where their nests are? Is it memory which traces their aerial way across regions seen for the first time? Evidently not," emphatically declares Fabre. So there you are. Where doctors (of science) fall out it is not for you or me to decide.

But Mary was growing excited. "See, she has put the worm down and is prying up the top of the hole. She has got it off. She is—"

"Ss-h," say I, for wasps can hear. Or, wait; that's quite dogmatic. Wasps fly away when you talk too loud. That's better. That's not judging wasp doing by what we can do. That is just telling an observed fact.

Mary "ssh"-ed, but she pointed a plump little finger; a finger trembling with excitement. The wasp had gone down into the uncovered hole with the worm. Then she backed out, found the lid, covered up the hole and flew away into the pickle-weed again!

In twenty minutes she came back, with another limp measuring-worm, straight to the covered hole; worm dropped on the ground; lid taken off; worm dragged in; wasp backed out; lid carefully replaced; flight to the distant jungle of pickle-weed again!

O, this was exciting. Mary fairly exploded into exclamations and questions after the wasp was well away. What are the worms for? Are they dead? The second one seemed to wriggle feebly a little on the ground by the nest while the wasp was getting off the lid. Will she bring more? Will she fill the hole full of worms? Now I knew the answers to some of these questions, for I had been in this happy place before, but I wanted Mary to find out, to discover—exquisite and prideful pleasure—for herself. So I remained dumb.

Three more times the wasp brought worms. Three more times went through all the performance. But the last time she didn't come up for a long time; that is, for several minutes, and when she did come, instead of putting the salt crust on the hole, she got a little pellet of soil and dropped it in; and then another, and many others. Sometimes she scraped them in with her front feet, but there weren't many bits of soil close enough for that, for she had carried them all a foot or so away as she brought them out of the hole. She worked very industriously: jumping and running about, making little buzzing leaps and flights, until she had quite filled up the hole with the five dead worms in the bottom.

Then she did the most wonderful thing. With her fore feet she pawed and raked the surface until it was quite smooth, and with her jaws and horny head she pressed down and tamped the fine bits of soil until they were a little below the surface of the salt crust around the hole, and then she brought again the little circular lid or top of salt crust and carefully put it in the little depression on the top of the filled-in burrow, so that it fitted perfectly with the hard uncut salt crust around the hole's edge!

This is true. Does it seem wonderful to you? Why? Because we think that other animals cannot do what would be a very simple thing indeed for us? Our wasp was evidently concealing the whereabouts of her worm-stored burrow. I don't say that she wanted to conceal it; or decided to conceal it; or even intended to conceal it. She was simply, I say, concealing it. That seems quite certain, doesn't it? Well, this action of cutting out and replacing the bit of salt crust over the burrow was about the simplest and most effective way of concealing the hole that could be reasoned out, if we ourselves were to undertake it. The wasp, and all the other wasps of the same kind in our marshes, concealed their holes in the way that our reason would suggest to us as the best way. But I do not say anything about the wasp's mental processes toward getting at this behavior. One thing is pretty sure. Among a score or hundred of us doing this work, there would be pretty sure to be some to do it in a different sort of way from the others. The wasps of the same kind all do it alike. Perhaps that is the chief difference between reason and instinct.

But if our digger-wasp—whose name is Ammophila, the sand-lover—made Mary's and my eyes bulge out by her cleverness, what shall we think of that other Ammophila that Dr. Williston watched on the plains of Kansas, or that other one still which the Peckhams studied in Wisconsin? These other Ammophilas, instead of using their hard heads to tamp down the soil in the hole, hunted about until they found a suitable little stone which, held tightly in the jaws, was used as a tool to pack and smooth the dirt! And the Kansas wasp did another odd thing. Instead of making its hole of the same caliber or width all the way down, the upper half-inch or so was made of greater diameter than the rest of the burrow so that a little circular shelf ran around the inside of the hole half an inch below the top. Now when the clever Kansas wasp closed the burrow each time it went away to hunt for measuring-worms, it did it in a curious way. I quote the exact words of Professor Williston, the observer: "When the excavation had been carried to the required depth"—this is our professional way of saying, when the hole had been dug deep enough—"the wasp, after surveying the premises, flying away, soon returned with a large pebble in its mandibles, which it carefully deposited within the opening; then, standing over the entrance upon her four posterior feet, she rapidly and most amusingly scraped the dust, 'hand over hand' back beneath her till she had filled the hole above the stone to the top. [The stone of course was resting on the little circular shelf half an inch down in the hole.] ... When she had heaped up the dirt to her satisfaction, she again flew away and immediately returned with a smaller pebble, perhaps an eighth of an inch in diameter, and then standing more nearly erect, with the front feet folded beneath her, she pressed down the dust all over and about the opening, smoothing off the surface and accompanying the action with a peculiar rasping sound."

Is this not a creature of wits, this Kansas wasp? And an undaunted worker? For each time she went away to get a nice fat looper, she covered up her hole in this elaborate way, and each time she came back, she had to remove the half-inch of tamped-down soil and the little covering stone resting on the shelf in the hole.

The Peckhams, too, saw an Ammophila in Wisconsin use a pebble as a tool, and what is especially interesting and important, this wasp was only a single individual of several others watched by the observers, all these wasps being of one kind, that is, belonging to the same species. The tool-user thus revealed an individuality that made its actions seem to be dictated by something else than rigid instinct; certainly so if instinct is to be defined as untaught and unreasoned behavior common to all the individuals of a kind. In fact the Peckhams (most persistent, practised and intelligent observers) insist that "in all the processes of Ammophila the character of the work differs with the individual."

But where is Mary in all this digression of mine? Never fear for Mary. While I was mumbling about instinct and reason and automatism and individual idiosyncrasy, Mary was crawling slowly and cautiously about over the salt-crust floor of our room, counting the wasp holes in course of making, and she was making a second discovery. The measuring-worms, limp and lifeless as they appeared, were really not dead! She had seen at least two, left lying on the ground by the hole while the wasp prized off the cover, give feeble wriggles, and one that she poked with a pin squirmed rather energetically. That is, it did if she poked it at one end, but not if she poked it in the middle, which is such a great discovery that it really gets to be science!

Now as one is entitled to take violent measures for the sake of science, Mary and I decided after considerable serious discussion to "collect" the hole which our wasp had finished and apparently left for good. So we dug it up, and on the spot we examined it and all of its insides. And we found it quite true that the loopers were not dead, but they were paralyzed! When we poked a head or tail, each worm could squirm just a little, but if we touched them in the middle, they didn't know it, and on one of them, the top one, we found a little shining white speck.

Mary's excitement became merged into an intense thoughtfulness. Then she cried aloud with eyes shining: "My, it's the egg! the egg of the wasp! and the worms are for food for the young wasp when it hatches!"

Ah, Mary, you have wits! Have you ever heard any one tell about this? Did you really guess it, or not guess it, but actually reason it out for yourself? Mary, I have great hopes of you.

For it is quite true what Mary says. The little white seed-like thing glued on to the last looper's body is the egg of the wasp, and the stung and paralyzed but not killed measuring-worms are the food stored up by this extremely clever narrow-waisted mother for the wingless, footless, blind, almost helpless wasp grub, when it shall hatch from the egg. Down in the darkness of the cell, there will be a horrible tragedy. For days and weeks together the wasp grub will nibble away on the helpless loopers until all five are eaten alive! Then the grub will change to a winged wasp with strong sharp jaws with which she will dig her way up and out of the noisome prison and into the free air and sunlight of the marsh room. And she will then dig holes of her own, find and sting and store loopers, lay an egg on one, and close up the hole just as her mother did. Or at least all this would happen if we hadn't collected the hole. But it will happen in the other holes.

But why should the loopers be only paralyzed instead of killed? Isn't it plain that if killed they would only be decaying carrion by the time the wasp grub was ready to eat them, and young wasps must have fresh meat, not dead and decayed flesh. And if the loopers were simply put in alive, not paralyzed, wouldn't their violent squirming in the hole surely crush the delicate egg or the more delicate newly hatched wasp grub? Or wouldn't they simply dig their way with their heavy jaws out of the hole and away? Or, indeed, could the slender-bodied mother wasp carry and handle successfully a strong squirming looper over an inch long? The reason for the paralyzing of the worms is plain then. But how is this extraordinary condition brought about? And the answer to this, which Mary and I didn't discover for ourselves, but had to find out from the accounts of the men who did, like Fabre and others, reveals the most extraordinary thing that our wasps do. Most people think the wasps that live in communities or large families in big paper nests (the yellow-jackets and hornets) are the most interesting and most intelligent or clever of the wasps. But Mary and I do not think so. The solitary wasps do the most wonderful things, and of all they do, the paralyzing of the insects they store up as food for their young is the hardest to explain on any basis except that of wasp reasoning. But of course we don't have to explain it, which is fortunate for the high record of truth we are trying to establish in this book.

Fabre, the patient Frenchman, waited for years and years for a chance to see just how the Ammophila paralyzes her victims, and at last he saw and understood it. To understand the matter from Fabre's account of it, we must remember that the measuring-worm's body is made up of a series of rings or body segments, in each of which (except the very last) is a little nerve center or brain situated just under the skin on the under side of the body. And all this row of brains is connected by a slender nerve cord running along the middle line of the under side of the long body. Now Fabre saw that the wasp darted its sting into each looper, "once for all at the fifth or sixth segment of the victim." And when he pricked the stung worms with a needle in various parts of the body, he found, just as Mary did, that the needle could entirely pierce the middle of the body (which is where the fifth and sixth segments are), without causing any movement of the worm. "But prick even slightly a segment in front or behind and the caterpillar struggles with a violence proportioned to the distance from the poisoned segment."

Now what is the reason, asks Fabre, for the wasp's selecting this particular spot for stinging the worm, and he answers his own question as follows:

"The loopers have the following organization, counting the head as the first segment: Three pairs of true feet on rings two, three, and four; four pairs of membranous feet on rings seven, eight, nine, and ten, and a last similar pair set on the thirteenth and final ring; in all eight pairs of feet, the first seven making two marked groups—one of three, the other of four pairs. These two groups are divided by two segments without feet, which are the fifth and sixth.

"Now, to deprive the caterpillar of means of escape, and to render it motionless, will the Hymenopteron [that's the wasp] dart its sting into each of the eight rings provided with feet? Especially will it do so when the prey is small and weak? Certainly not: a single stab will suffice if given in a central spot, whence the torpor produced by the venomous droplet can spread gradually with as little delay as possible into the midst of those segments which bear feet. There can be no doubt which to choose for this single inoculation; it must be the fifth or sixth, which separate the two groups of locomotive rings. The point indicated by rational deduction is also the one adopted by instinct. Finally, let us add that the egg of the Ammophila is invariably laid on the paralyzed ring. There, and there alone, can the young larva bite without inducing dangerous contortions; where a needle prick has no effect, the bite of a grub will have none either, and the prey will remain immovable until the nursling has gained strength and can bite farther on without danger."

But some Ammophilas catch much larger caterpillars than the inch-long, slender, little loopers. Fabre found a wasp dragging to its nest a caterpillar weighing fifteen times the weight of the wasp. Does one stab suffice for such a giant caterpillar? Here is what Fabre saw: An Ammophila was noticed scratching in the ground around the crown of a plant. She was "pulling up little grass roots, and poking her head under the tiny clods which she raised up, and running hurriedly, now here, now there, round the thyme, visiting every crack which gave access under it; yet she was not digging a burrow, but hunting something hidden underground, as was shown by manœuvres like those of a dog trying to get a rabbit out of its hole. And presently, disturbed by what was going on overhead and closely tracked by the Ammophila, a big gray worm made up his mind to quit his abode and come up to daylight. It is all over with him; the hunter is instantly on the spot, gripping the nape of his neck and holding on in spite of his contortions. Settled on the monster's back, the Ammophila bends her abdomen, and, methodically, deliberately—like a surgeon thoroughly familiar with the anatomy of his subject—plunges a lancet into the ventral surface of every segment, from the first to the last. Not one ring is omitted; with or without feet each is stabbed in due order from the front to the back."

This is what the patient, careful observer saw, with all the "leisure and ease required for an irreproachable observation." "The wasp acts," says Fabre, "with a precision of which science might be jealous; it knows what man but rarely knows; it is acquainted with the complex nervous system of its victim, and keeps repeated stabs for those with numerous ganglia. I said 'It knows; is acquainted'; what I ought to say is, 'It acts as if it did.' What it does is suggested to it; the creature obeys, impelled by instinct, without reasoning on what it does. But whence comes this sublime instinct? Can theories of atavism, of selection, of the struggle for life, interpret it reasonably?"

When I had finished reading this to Mary she looked up and said softly: "Of course I don't understand all this that he says about 'avatism and selection' and so on, but I think the wasp knows. Don't you?"

"Mary," I reply promptly, "the word is 'atavism,' not 'avatism,' please remember!"

"I hope I can," said Mary.

[RED AND BLACK AGAINST WHITE]

The meadow lark on the fence post behind my house is unusually voluble this uncertain morning; maybe he is getting his day's singing off before the sun shall hide, discomfited, behind the unrolling cloud furls. A solemn grackle, with yellow eyes and bronzed neck, stalks with cocking head in the wet green of the well-groomed front lawn; a whisking bevy of goldfinches, which chat to each other in high-pitched hurried phrases, disposes itself with much concern in the bare tree across the road, and swinging along overhead, a woodpecker cries its harsh greetings. But the life here on the street is tame and usual compared to that busy living and to those eventful happenings taking place in a remoter corner of the garden. There where the warm dust is figured with the dainty tracks of the quail hosts and the flower-flies hum their contentedest note; there in that half-artificial, half-wild covert of odorous vegetation, a life in miniature, with the excitement and stresses, the failures and successes and the inevitable comedies and tragedies of any world of life is going on, with the history of it all unrecorded.

Mary has just come to call on me, bringing an unkempt bouquet of Scotch broom from the garden. On these branches of broom are many conspicuous white spots. They are not flowers, for it is not broom flower time, and the flowers are yellow when their time does come. But these white spots, soft little cottony masses, like little pillows or cushions, and with regular tiny flutings along the top, have puzzled Mary, and she has come to ask me about them, for I am supposed to know all things. Well, luckily, I do happen to know about these, but I suggest that we go into the garden together and see if we can find out. The truth is, I am glad of an excuse to get away from this tiresome German book about Entwicklungslehre. And then, too, I want to look at things and talk with Mary.

Mary has such a fascinatingly serious way of doing things that aren't serious at all. She has got the curious notion lately that many little people live among the grasses, the grass people she calls them, and that that is the reason there are so many very little white flowers coming up in my lawn. My own notion had been that some rascally seedsman had sold me unclean grass seed, but Mary's notion that the grass people are planting and raising these little flowers for their own special delectation is, of course, a much wiser one. So when we walk on the lawn, we go very slowly, and I have to poke constantly among the grasses with my stick as we move along so that the little people may know we are coming and have time to scurry away from under our great boots.

When we got out to the row of brooms, we found many of the soft white cushions on all the bushes. But some of them were torn and dishevelled. And in these torn masses many tiny round particles could be seen. These little black specks are simply eggs, insect eggs, as I told Mary, and soon she had discovered among them some slightly larger but still very small red spots which were waving tiny black feet and feelers about. They were of course the baby insects just hatching from the eggs.

"Does the mother lay the eggs in these little white cushions and then go away and leave them?" asks Mary.

"No, she stays right by them," I answer.

"But where is she then? I can't—Yes I can too," cries Mary in great triumph. "Here she is at one end of the egg cushion. She is a part of it."

"Well, no, not exactly," I have to say. "It is part of her, or rather she spins the cushion, which is really a sac or soft box of white wax, in which to lay her eggs. Something the way the spiders do, you know. Only their egg box is made of silk and usually fastened to a fence rail or on the bark of a tree and left there. But some of the spiders, the large, swiftly running, black kinds that live under stones, carry the silken ball with the eggs inside about with them, fastened to the end of the body. Well, this cottony cushion scale insect—that's its right name—keeps its waxen sac of eggs fastened to it, but as the egg sac is much larger than the insect itself, it can't run about any more, but has to stay for all the rest of the time until it dies in the spot where it makes the sac. However, as it gets all the food it wants by sticking its slender little beak into the broom or other plant it is on and sucking up the fresh sap, it gets on very well."

"But what makes some of the egg cushions—how pretty they are, too!—so torn and pulled open," asks Mary, who has listened to my long speech very nicely. She often gets impatient when I lecture for too many minutes together.

"That is for you to find out," I say. "There is a dreadful thing going on here if you can only see it. But a rather good thing too. Good for the broom bushes anyway, and as they are my broom bushes and I like their flowers, good for me."

Just then a very stubby, round-backed, quick little red beetle with black spots walked off a broom stem on to Mary's hand. She didn't scream, of course, nor even jerk her hand away. She may learn when she is older to be frightened when pretty, harmless, little lady-bird beetles walk on her. But now she likes all sorts of small animals, and is not afraid at all.

Mary is not at all slow to understand things, and when this hard-bodied little beetle, with a body like half a red-and-black pill, walked off the broom on to her hand, she guessed that he might have something to do with the torn-up egg cushions. So it didn't take her long to find another little beast like him actually nosing about in an egg sac and voraciously snapping up all the unfortunate tiny, red, black-legged baby scale insects. He ate the eggs, too, and seemed to take some bites at the mother insect herself, and then Mary found more of the lady-bird beetles, and still more. They were on all the broom bushes where the white cushions were. And so one of the dreadful tragedies going on in my garden was soon quite plain to Mary, and she was very sorry for the helpless white insects.

"Where did the red beetles come from?" she asked pretty soon.

"From Australia," I answered. "Or rather their great-great-grandparents did. These particular beetles were probably born right here in the garden, because a colony of them live here. But they couldn't if there were not some cottony cushion scale insects here too. For this particular kind of lady-bird beetle can't live on any other food—at least they don't—except this particular kind of scale insect and its eggs, which is surely a curious thing, isn't it?"

But Mary is so used to finding that the insects have extremely unusual and curious habits—that is, habits different from ours—that she doesn't get excited any more when I tell her about them. She does though when she finds them out for herself, which makes me wonder if I haven't wasted a good deal of time in my life giving lectures to students about things instead of always making them find out for themselves. And maybe I am wasting some more time now while I am writing!

"How did they come from Australia?" asks Mary. For she knows that Australia is several thousand miles away across the ocean from California, and lady-bird beetles do not swim. At least not from Australia to America. So I have to give Mary another informing lecture, and this is it:

"Years and years ago, there lived in some fragrant-leaved orange-trees in Australia some white cottony cushion insects whose life was untroubled by other cares than those of eating and of looking after the children. As each insect was fastened for life on the leaf or twig that supplied it with all the food it needed, which was simply an occasional drink of sap, and as the white insects always died before their children were born, neither of these cares was very harassing. On thousands of other similar fragrant-leaved orange-trees in Australia lived millions of other similar white insects. And for a long time this race of white insects enjoyed life. Those were happy days. But on a time there came into one of the trees a few small red beetles, who eagerly and persistently set about the awful business of eating the defenceless white insects. From this tree the red beetles, or the children of them, went to other trees where white insects lived, and with unrelenting rapacity and uncloyed appetite ate all the white insects they could find. And so in other trees; and finally, with years, the red beetles had invaded all of the thousands of fragrant-leaved orange-trees in Australia, and had eaten nearly all of the millions of white insects.

"One day a very small orange-tree was taken out of the ground in Australia and sent with many others across the ocean to California. On this small tree there were a few of the white insects. The little tree was planted again in California and soon put out many fresh fragrant leaves. The white insects were astonished and rejoiced that day after day went by without the appearance of any red beetles. The white insects increased in numbers; there were thousands of fragrant-leaved orange-trees in California, and in a few years there were millions of white insects in them. One morning a man stood among the trees and said, 'Confound these bugs; they'll ruin me; what shall I do?' and a man who knew said, 'Get some red beetles from Australia.' So this orange-grower, with some others, paid a man to go to Australia and collect some live red beetles. The collector went across the ocean, three weeks' steady steaming, and sent back a few of the voracious little beetles in a pill box. They were put into a tree in a California orange-orchard in which there were many cottony cushion scale insects. The red insects promptly began eating the white ones; and their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren have kept up this eating ever since. And so the orange-growers never tire of telling how the red beetles (whose name is Vedalia) were brought from Australia to save them from ruin by the white insects (whose name is Icerya)."

Now there are not many cottony cushion scales left in California. A very promising colony of them seems to have sprung up in my Scotch broom bushes. But the red beetles have found their way there already, as Mary and I discovered to-day, and so we think that by the time the broom flowers come, there will be few white insects left in the bushes.

[THE VENDETTA]

This is the story of a fight. In the first story of this book, I said that Mary and I had seen a remarkable fight one evening at sundown on the slopes of the bare brown foothills west of the campus. It was not a battle of armies—we have seen that, too, in the little world we watch,—but a combat of gladiators, a struggle between two champions born and bred for fighting, and particularly for fighting each other. One champion was Eurypelma, the great, black, hairy, eight-legged, strong-fanged tarantula of California, and the other was Pepsis, a mighty wasp in dull-blue mail, with rusty-red wings and a poisonous javelin of a sting that might well frighten either you or me. Do you have any wasp in your neighborhood of the ferocity and strength and size of Pepsis? If not, you can hardly realize what a terrible creature she is. With her strong hard-cased body an inch and a half long, borne on powerful wings that expand fully three inches, and her long and strong needle-pointed sting that darts in and out like a flash and is always full of virulent poison, Pepsis is certainly queen of all the wasp amazons. But if that is so, no less is Eurypelma greatest, most dreadful, and fiercest, and hence king, of all the spiders in this country. In South America and perhaps elsewhere in the tropics, live the fierce bird-spiders with thick legs extending three inches or more on each side of their ugly hairy bodies. Eurypelma, the California tarantula, is not quite so large as that, nor does he stalk, pounce on and kill little birds as his South American cousin is said to do, but he is nevertheless a tremendous and fear-inspiring creature among the small beasties of field and meadow.

But not all Eurypelmas are so ferocious; or at least are not ferocious all the time. There are individual differences among them. Perhaps it is a matter of age or health. Anyway, I had a pet tarantula which I kept in an open jar in my room for several weeks, and I could handle him with impunity. He would sit gently on my hand, or walk deliberately up my arm, with his eight, fixed, shining, little reddish eyes staring hard at me, and his long seven-jointed hairy legs swinging gently and rhythmically along, without a sign of hesitation or excitement. His hair was almost gray and perhaps this hoariness and general sedateness betokened a ripe old age. But his great fangs were unblunted, his supply of poison undiminished, and his skill in striking and killing his prey still perfect, as often proved at his feeding times. He is quite the largest Eurypelma I have ever seen. He measures—for I still have his body, carefully stuffed, and fastened on a block with legs all spread out—five inches from tip to tip of opposite legs.

At the same time that I had this hoary old tarantula, I had another smaller, coal-black fellow who went into a perfect ecstasy of anger and ferocity every time any one came near him. He would stand on his hind legs and paw wildly with fore legs and palpi, and lunge forward fiercely at my inquisitive pencil. I found him originally in the middle of an entry into a classroom, holding at bay an entire excited class of art students armed with mahl-sticks and paint-brushes. The students were mostly women, and I was hailed as deliverer and greatest dompteur of beasts when I scooped Eurypelma up in a bottle and walked off with him.

But this is not telling of the sundown fight that Mary and I saw together. We had been over to the sand-cut by the golf links, after mining-bees, and were coming home with a fine lot of their holes and some of the bees themselves, when Mary suddenly called to me to "see the nice tarantula."

Perhaps nice isn't the best word for him, but he certainly was an unusually imposing and fluffy-haired and fierce-looking brute of a tarantula. He had rather an owly way about him, as if he had come out from his hole too early and was dazed and half-blinded by the light. Tarantulas are night prowlers; they do all their hunting after dark, dig their holes and, indeed, carry on all the various businesses of their life in the night-time. The occasional one found walking about in daytime has made a mistake, someway, and he blunders around quite like an owl in the sunshine.

All of a sudden, while Mary and I were smiling at this too early bird of a tarantula, he went up on his hind legs in fighting attitude, and at the same instant down darted a great tarantula hawk, that is, a Pepsis wasp. Her armored body glinted cool and metallic in the red sunset light, and her great wings had a suggestive shining of dull fire about them. She checked her swoop just before reaching Eurypelma, and made a quick dart over him, and then a quick turn back, intending to catch the tarantula in the rear. But lethargic and owly as Eurypelma had been a moment before, he was now all alertness and agility. He had to be. He was defending his life. One full fair stab of the poisoned javelin, sheathed but ready at the tip of the flexible, blue-black body hovering over him, and it would be over with Eurypelma. And he knew it. Or perhaps he didn't. But he acted as if he did. He was going to do his best not to be stabbed; that was sure. And Pepsis was going to do her best to stab; that also was quickly certain.

At the same time Pepsis knew—or anyway acted as if she did—that to be struck by one or both of those terrible vertical, poison-filled fangs was sure death. It would be like a blow from a battle-axe, with the added horror of mortal poison poured into the wound.

So Eurypelma about-faced like a flash, and Pepsis was foiled in her strategy. She flew up and a yard away, then returned to the attack. She flew about in swift circles over his head, preparatory to darting in again. But Eurypelma was ready. As she swooped viciously down, he lunged up and forward with a half-leap, half-forward fall, and came within an ace of striking the trailing blue-black abdomen with his reaching fangs. Indeed it seemed to Mary and me as if they really grazed the metallic body. But evidently they had not pierced the smooth armor. Nor had Pepsis in that breathless moment of close quarters been able to plant her lance. She whirled up, high this time but immediately back, although a little more wary evidently, for she checked her downward plunge three or four inches from the dancing champion on the ground. And so for wild minute after minute it went on; Eurypelma always up and tip-toeing on those strong hind legs, with open, armed mouth always toward the point of attack, and Pepsis ever darting down, up, over, across, and in and out in dizzy dashes, but never quite closing.

Were Mary and I excited? Not a word could we utter; only now and then a swift intake of breath; a stifled "O" or "Ah" or "See." And then of a sudden came the end. Pepsis saw her chance. A lightning swoop carried her right on to the hairy champion. The quivering lance shot home. The poison coursed into the great soft body. But at the same moment the terrible fangs struck fair on the blue armor and crashed through it. Two awful wounds, and the wings of dull fire beat violently only to strike up a little cloud of dust and whirl the mangled body around and around. Fortunately Death was merciful, and the brave amazon made a quick end.

But what of Eurypelma, the killer? Was it well with him? The sting-made wound itself was of little moment; it closed as soon as the lancet withdrew. But not before the delicate poison sac at its base inside the wasp-body had contracted and squirted down the slender hollow of the sting a drop of liquid fire. And so it was not well with Eurypelma in his insides. Victor he seemed to be, but if he could think, he must have had grave doubts about the joys of victory.

For a curious drowsiness was coming over him. Perhaps, disquieting thought, it was the approaching stupor of the poison's working. His strong long legs became limp, they would not work regularly, they could not hold his heavy hairy body up from the ground. He would get into his hole and rest. But it was too late. And after a few uneven steps, victor Eurypelma settled heavily down beside his amazon victim, inert and forevermore beyond fighting. He was paralyzed.

And so Mary and I brought him home in our collecting box, together with the torn body of Pepsis with her wings of slow fire dulled by the dust of her last struggles. And though it is a whole month now since Eurypelma received his stab from the poisoned javelin of Pepsis, he has not recovered; nor will he ever. When you touch him, he draws up slowly one leg after another, or moves a palpus feebly. But it is living death; a hopeless paralytic is the king.

Dear reader, you are of course as bright as Mary, and so you have noticed, as she did right away, the close parallel between what happened to Eurypelma and what happened to the measuring-worms brought by Ammophila to her nest burrow as described in the first story in this book. And so, like Mary, you realize that the vendetta or life feud between the tarantula family and the family of Pepsis, the tarantula hawk, is based on reasons of domestic economy rather than on those of sentiment, which determine vendettas in Corsica and feuds in Kentucky.

To be quite plain, Pepsis fights Eurypelma to get his huge, juicy body for food for her young; and Eurypelma fights Pepsis to keep from becoming paralyzed provender. If Pepsis had escaped unhurt in the combat at which Mary and I "assisted," as the French say, as enthralled spectators, we should have seen her drag by mighty effort the limp, paralyzed, spider giant to her nest hole not far distant—a great hole twelve inches deep and with a side chamber at the bottom. There she would have thrust him down the throat of the burrow, and then crawled in and laid an egg on the helpless beast, from which in time would have hatched the carnivorous wasp grub. Pepsis has many close allies among the wasps, all black or steely blue with smoky or dull-bronze wings, and they all use spiders, stung and paralyzed, to store their nest holes with.

"Do the little black and blue wasps hunt the little spiders and the larger ones the big spiders?" asks Mary.

"Exactly," I respond, "and the giant wasp of them all, Pepsis, the queen of the wasp amazons, hunts only the biggest spider of them all, Eurypelma, the tarantula king, and we have seen her do it."

"Well," says Mary, "even if she wants him for her children to eat, it's a real vendetta, isn't it?"

"Indeed it is," I answer, "it's more real, and fiercer, and more relentless, and more persistent than any human vendetta that ever was. For every Pepsis mother in the world is always hunting for Eurypelmas to fight. And not all Corsicans have a vendetta on hand, nor all Kentuckians a feud."

[THE TRUE STORY OF THE PIT OF MORROWBIE JUKES]

"It seemed that some one was calling to me in a whisper—'Sahib! Sahib! Sahib!' exactly as my bearer used to call me in the mornings. I fancied that I was delirious until a handful of sand fell at my feet. Then I looked up and saw a head peering down into the amphitheater—the head of Dunnoo, my dog-boy, who attended to my collies. As soon as he had attracted my attention, he held up his hand and showed a rope. I motioned, staggering to and fro the while, that he should throw it down. It was a couple of leather punkah-ropes knotted together, with a loop at one end. I slipped the loop over my head and under my arms; heard Dunnoo urge something forward; was conscious that I was being dragged, face downward, up the steep sand-slope, and the next instant found myself choked and half-fainting on the sand-hills overlooking the crater."

And then Mary broke in. We were lying in a sunny warm spot on an open hillside a little way off the road, and I was reading aloud from a favorite author.

"That is a fairy story," said Mary, "and I thought we were not going to read any more fairy stories now that I am grown up."

Mary's idea of being grown up is to be more than three feet eleven inches high and to have her hair no longer in two braids.

"Not exactly a fairy story," I replied. "For Kipling rather prefers soldiers to fairies and machines to caps of invisibility. Of course, though, he wrote the Mowgli stories."

"But those are not fairy stories," interrupted Mary. "Those were about a real boy and real animals only a long way off and different from ours."

"Ah-um, real? Well, perhaps; anyway, the Mowgli animals seem more real than most real animals. But this story of the sand-pit and the man sliding down into it and not being able to get out isn't impossible at all. Only the other people down in the bottom seem a little unusual."

"No, there can't be any such place," said Mary positively, "and as there can't be any such place, nobody could have slid into it or been in the bottom, and so it is a fairy story. Any story that isn't so is a fairy story."

"Well, that makes it easy to tell a fairy story from the other kinds, and I never knew exactly how before. But I once saw a place much like the sand-pit that Morrowbie Jukes slid into, or that Kipling says he slid into. It is on the side of a great mountain in Oregon; Mt. Hood its name is. I had climbed far above timber line, that is, above where all the trees and bushes stop because it is too cold for them to live, and there is only bare rocks and snow and ice, and had sat down to rest near a great snowbank a mile long. As I looked back down the mountain I saw a curious yellowish smoke rising in little puffs and curls. I decided to find out about this smoke on my way down; perhaps it was the beginning of a forest fire, and ought to be put out.

"Well, when I got to it there was no fire; the puffs and curls were not smoke. It was a real Morrowbie Jukes pit; a great crater-like hole in the mountain, with its side so steep that the loose volcanic sand and rocks (for the whole mountain is an old volcano) kept slipping down in little avalanches from which puffs and curls of fine yellow dust kept rising and drifting lazily away. If I had made the mistake of going too close to the edge, I should certainly have started one of these avalanches and gone slipping and sliding, faster and faster, to the very bottom, a thousand feet below."

"My!" said Mary; "and were there horrible people in the bottom, and crows?"

"Well, really, Mary, I couldn't see on account of the dust-smoke."

"Of course there weren't, probably," said Mary thoughtfully and a little wistfully.

"Probably not," I had to reply regretfully.

But a bright thought came to me. I remembered something. Several days before I had tramped along this hillside road near which Mary and I were lying and I had seen—well, just wait. So I said to Mary: "But I know where there is a Morrowbie Jukes pit, several of them, indeed, near here. Sha'n't we go and see them?"

"Why, of course," said Mary rather severely.

"Let us go galloping as Morrowbie Jukes did," said I. So we took hold of hands and as soon as we got out of the chaparral, we went galloping, hop, hop, hoppity, hop, down the road. I must confess that I got out of breath pretty soon and my knees seemed to creak a little. And when a swift motor-car came exploding by, going up the hill, all the people stared and smiled to see an elderly gentleman with spectacles and a long coat hop-hopping along with a yellow-haired red-cheeked little girl in knee skirts. But we don't mind people much! They simply don't know all the things that go with being happy.

Pretty soon—and it was high time, for I had only three breaths left—we came to a place where the road bent sharply around the hillside and was especially broad.

"Now, Mary," I said, "be careful and don't fall in. I'm afraid I could not get you out."

"Fall in where? Get me out of what?" asked Mary, quite puzzled. She was staring about excitedly, looking most of the time down into the cañon with its spiry redwood trees pushing far up from the bottom. And then suddenly she saw. She flopped down on her hands and knees in the warm sand by the roadside and cried out, "What funny little holes!"

"Why, Mary," I said with pained surprise. "You don't really mean to call these awful Morrowbie Jukes pits 'funny little holes'! That isn't fair after all we've done to find them. Especially after my galloping all the way right to the very edge of this largest one."

As I spoke I pointed it out with the toe of my shoe, but inadvertently filled it all up by poking a couple of tablespoonfuls of sand and dust into it. But size is quite a relative matter, and for the tiny creatures with whom Mary and I have to deal, the little crater-like holes in the sand of the roadside are large and dangerous pits. We sprawled down on our stomachs among the pits to see what we could see.

Mary saw first. Ah, those bright eyes! My spectacles are rather in the way out-of-doors, I find. But if I keep on getting younger—and I certainly am younger since I got acquainted with Mary—I shall be able soon to leave them at home in my study when I go out to see things.

Mary, then, saw first. What she saw were two very small shining, brown, gently curved, sharp-pointed, sickle-like jaws sticking up out of the loose sand in the very bottom of one of the pits. They moved once, these curved and pointed jaws, and that movement caught Mary's eye.

"It's the dragon of the pit," I cried. "Dig him out!"

So Mary dug him out. He was very spry and had a strong tendency to shuffle backwards down into the hiding sand. But it takes a keen dragon to get away from Mary, and this one wasn't and didn't.

He was an ugly little brute, squat and hump-backed, with sand sticking to his thinly haired body. But he was fierce-looking for all his diminutiveness. Remember again that whether a thing is big or little to you depends on whether you are big or little. This dragon of the sand-pit was little to us. He is terribly big to the ants.

When Mary got him out and had put him down on the sand near the pit, he trotted about very actively but always backwards. He seems to have got so used to pulling backwards against the frantic struggles of his prey to get up and out of the pit, that he can now only move that way. After we watched him a while, we "collected" him; that is, put him into a bottle, with some sand, to take home and see if we could keep him in our room of live things. Then we turned our attention to another crater. It was about three inches across at the top and about two inches deep; a symmetrical little broad-mouthed funnel with the loose sand-slopes just as steep as they could be. The slightest disturbance, a touch with a pencil-point for example, would start little sand avalanches down the slopes anywhere. It is, of course, easy to see how this horrible pit-trap works. And, in fact, in the very next moment we saw actually how it did work.

A foraging brown ant that was running swiftly over the ground plunged squarely over the verge of the crater before she could stop. She certainly tried hard to stop when once over, but it was too late. Slipping and sliding with the rolling sand-grains, down she went right toward those waiting scimitar-like jaws.

Now, these jaws deserve a word of description. Because, horrible as they may seem to the unfortunate ants, they are so well arranged for their particular purpose that they must attract our admiration. The dragon of the pit, ant-lion he is usually called, has no open, yawning mouth behind those projecting jaws, as might be expected. Indeed there is no mouth at all, just a throat, thirsty for ant blood! The slender scimitar jaws have each a groove on the concave inner side, and down this groove runs the blood of the struggling victim, held impaled on the sharp points of the curving mandibles. The two fine grooves lead directly into the throat, and thus there is no need of open mouth with lips and tongue, such as other insects have.

"But see," cried Mary, "the ant has stopped sliding. It is going to get out!"

Ah, Mary, you are not making allowance for all the resources of this dreadful dragon of the pit. Not only is the pit a nearly perfect trap, and the eager jaws at the bottom more deadly than any array of spikes or spears at the bottom of an elephant pit, but there is another most effective thing about this fatal dragon's trap, and that is this: it is not merely a passive trap, but an active one. Already it is in action. And Mary sees now how hopeless it is with the ant. For a shower of sand is being thrown up from the bottom of the pit against the ant and it is again sliding down. The dragon has a flat, broad head and powerful neck muscles, and has wit enough to shovel up and hurl masses of dry sand-grains against the victim on the loose slopes. And this starts the avalanche again, and so down slides the frantic ant.

What follows is too painful for Mary and me to watch and certainly too cruel to describe. But one must live, and why not ant-lions as well as ants? If truth must be told, many ants have as cruel habits and as bloodthirsty tastes as the ant-dragon. Indeed, more cruel and revolting habits. For ants have a gastronomic fondness for the babies of other ants, which is a fondness quite different from that which they ought to have. It means that they like these babies—to eat. Some communities of ants, indeed, spend most of their time fighting other communities just to rob them of their babies, which they carry off to their own nests and use in horrible cannibalistic feasts.

Mary and I had seen enough of the Morrowbie Jukes pits. So we went back to our little open sunny spot in the chaparral on the hillside and lay quiet and silent for a long time. Then Mary murmured, "I wonder how the ant-lion digs its pit."

"I can tell you, Mary," I replied. "For a man who once saw one digging told me. It is this way: First he makes a circular groove the full circumference of the top of the pit. Then he burrows into the sand inside of the groove and piles sand-grains on top of his flat, horny, shovel-like head with his fore feet. This sand he tosses over the groove so that it will fall outside. He works his way all around the groove, doing this over and over, and then makes another groove inside the first, and digs up and tosses the sand out as before. And so on, groove after groove, each inside the one made before, thus gradually making a conical pit with the sides as steep as the loose sand will lie. The pit must always be made in a dry sandy spot, and is usually located in a warm sunny place at the foot of a large rock. This man said that it is easy to get the ant-lions to dig pits in boxes of sand in the house, and so we can try with our 'collected' fellow."

Mary was silent some moments. Then she said softly, "But how will he get anything to eat?"

"Why," said I, "of course we can give him—" Mary looked up at me in a special way she has. I go on, more slowly, but still without very much hesitation: "But, of course, we sha'n't do that, shall we?"

And Mary said quietly: "No, we sha'n't."

We rested our chins on our hands and lay still, looking down over the chaparral-covered hillside and far out across the hazy valley. On the distant bay were little white specks, small schooners that carry wood and tan-bark and hay from the bay towns to San Francisco; and across the blue bay lifted the bare, brown mountains of the Coast Range, with always that gleaming white spot of the Observatory a-tiptop of the highest peak. It was a soft, languid, lazy day. Such a peace-giving, relaxing, healing day! And we were so enveloped by it, Mary and I, that we simply lay still and happy, with hardly a word. I had, of course, intended to give Mary an informing lecture about how the ugly, horrid ant-lion finally stops preying on ants and rolls himself up in a neat little silk-and-sand ball, and changes into a beautiful, slender-bodied, gauzy-winged creature without any resemblance at all to its earlier incarnation. But I didn't. It was too fine a day to spoil with informing lectures.

And so Mary and I lay still and happy. Finally it was time to go. As we went down the road we passed again the place of the pits, and Mary looked once more at the neat little craters with their patient waiting jaws at the bottom.

"I wonder," she said, musingly, "if Mr. Kipling ever saw an ant-lion pit."

"I wonder," said I.

[ARGIOPE OF THE SILVER SHIELD]

Argiope of the Silver Shield is the handsomest spider that Mary and I know. Do you know a handsomer? Or are you of those who have prejudices, and hold all spiders to be ugly, hateful things? We are so sorry for you if you are, for that means you can never enjoy having a pet Argiope. The truth is, Mary and I like clever and skillful people, but when we can't find that kind, we rather prefer clever and skillful spiders and wasps or other lowly beasties to the other sort of people, which shows just how far a fancy for nature may lead one.

It is rather bad, of course, to prefer to chum with a spider, even such a wonderfully handsome and clever one as Argiope, instead of with a human soul. But that isn't our situation exactly. We prefer human souls to anything else on earth, but not human stomachs and livers and human bones and muscles and sick human nerves. And, someway, too many people leave on one an impression of bowels or sore eyes rather than one of mind and soul. So we rush to the fields or woods or roads after such an experience and live a while with the keen bright eyes, the sensitive feelers, the dexterous feet and claws and teeth, and the sharp wits of the small folk who, while not human, are nevertheless inhabitants and possessors of this earth, side by side with us, and are truly our blood-cousins, though some incredible number of generations removed.

Mary and I scraped acquaintance with our Argiope in a cypress-tree. That is, Argiope had her abiding-place there; she was there on her great symmetrical orb-web, with its long strong foundation lines, its delicate radii and its many circles with their thousands of tiny drops of viscid stuff to make them sticky. In the center was the hub, her resting-place, whence the radii ran out, and where she had spun a broad zigzaggy band of white silk on which she stood or sat head downward. Her eight long, slender, sensitive legs were outstretched and rested by their tips lightly on the bases of the taut radii so that they could feel the slightest disturbance in the web. These many radii, besides supporting the sticky circles or spiral, which was the real catching part of the web, acted like so many telegraph lines to carry news of the catching to waiting Argiope at the center.

I have said that Mary and I think Argiope of the Silver Shield the most handsome spider we know. There are, however, other Argiopes to dispute the glory with our favorite; for example, a golden-yellow-and-black one and another beautiful silver-and-russet one. Other people, too, may fancy other spiders; perhaps the little pink-and-white crab-spiders of the flower-cups, or the curious spiny Acrosomas and Gasteracanthas with their brilliant colors and bizarre patterns and shape. Others may like the strawberry Epeira, or the diadem-spider, or the beautiful Nephilas. There are enough kinds and colors and shapes of spiders to satisfy all tastes. But we like best and admire most the long-legged, agile, graceful Argiopes, and particularly her of the silver shield. Her full, firm body with its flat, shield-shaped back, all shining silver and crossed by staring black-and-yellow stripes, the long tapering legs softly ringed with brown and yellow, the shining black eyes on their little rounded hillock of a forehead, and the broad, brown under body with eight circular silver spots; all go to make our Argiope a richly dressed and stately queen of spiders. But the royal consort—O, the less said of him, the better. A veritable dwarf; insignificant, inconspicuous and afraid for his life of his glorious mate. How such a queen could ever—but there, how tiresome, for that is what gets said of most matches, royal or plebeian.

Mary and I brought Argiope in from her home in the cypress-tree and put her in a fine, roomy, light and airy cage, where she could live quietly and unmolested by enemies, and where we could see to it that she should not lack for food. There are many of the small creatures with which we get acquainted that do not object at all to being brought into our well-lighted, well-ventilated, warm vivarium—that means live-room. Creatures of sedentary habits, and all the web-making spiders are of course that, ought not to object at all and usually do not seem to. For they get two things that they cannot be sure of outside: protection and plenty of food. Argiope seemed perfectly content and settled right down to spinning a glistening new web, a marvel of symmetry and skillful construction, in her roomy cage, and in a day or two was seated quietly but watchfully on the broad-banded hub in the center, with her toes on her telegraph lines, ready for good news. It was, of course, our duty to see that she was not disappointed.

The message she wanted was from some struggling fly fastened anywhere in the broad expanse of web. So we tossed in a fly. It buzzed about a moment, then blundered into the web which it shook violently in its struggle to escape. Argiope rushed at once out upon the web.

"How can she run about on the sticky web without getting caught, too?" interrupts Mary.

I think a moment, then with some dignity reply: "Pretty soon, please, Mary."

Argiope, I repeat, rushed at once out upon the web, seized the fly in her jaws and ran back to the hub with it, where she appeared to wet it all over, squeeze it into a ball and then proceed to feed upon it, holding and manipulating it skillfully all the time in her jaws. Evidently Argiope was very hungry, for as you will see, this is not her usual way of taking care of her prey.

"Now, Mary, what was it you asked?"

"Oh, just how the spider can run around so fast on the web without sticking to it and getting caught or tearing it all to pieces."

"Ah,—ah, yes. Well, Mary, I don't know! that is, exactly; or, well not even very close to exactly. But she does it, you see."

"Yes, I see," said Mary, demurely, and—can it be that Mary is slightly winking one eye? I do hope not.

"Of course you know, Mary, that the web is made of two kinds of silk or rather two kinds of lines? Oh, you didn't know?" Mary has shaken her head.

"Well it is," I continue, with my usual manner of teacher-who-knows somewhat restored again. "The foundation lines, the radii and a first set of circles are all made of lines without any sticky stuff on them. As you see"—and I touch my pencil confidently to a radius, with the manner of a parlor magician. "Then the spider, on this foundation, spins in another long spiral, the present circles of the web, which is liberally supplied with tiny, shining droplets of viscid silk that never dries, but stays moist and very sticky all the time. This is the true catching part of the web."

"We surely must watch her spin a web sometime," breaks in eager Mary.

"We certainly must," say I, and continue. "Now perhaps when Argiope runs out on the web from her watching-place at the hub, she only puts her long delicate feet on the unsticky radii. Or perhaps her feet are made in some peculiar way so that they do not stick to the circles. As a matter of fact, a spider's foot is remarkably fashioned, with curious toothed claws, and hosts of odd hairs, some knobbed, some curved and hook-like, and some forming dense little brushes. But after all, Mary, the truth is, I don't know really how it is that spiders can run about over their webs without getting stuck to them."

After my long discursus about web-making and spider's feet, it seemed time to give Argiope another fly. Indeed her bright little black eyes seemed to Mary to be shining with eagerness for more fly, although she still had the remains of the first one in her jaws—gracious, Argiope's jaws, please, not Mary's!

So we tossed in another fly. We hope you won't think this cruel. But flies are what Argiope eats, and if she was out in the garden, she would be catching them, and, what is worse, they would not be the disgusting and dangerous house-flies and bluebottles that we feed her, but all sorts of innocent and beautiful little picture-winged flower-flies and pomace-flies and what not. House-flies and stable-flies and bluebottles are truly dangerous because they help spread human diseases, especially typhoid fever. So if we are to live safely they should be killed. Or, better, prevented from hatching and growing at all.

So we tossed in another fly. Argiope immediately dropped the nearly finished first fly into the web, ran out to the new one and pounced on it, seizing it with her fore legs. Then she doubled her abdomen quickly underneath her and there issued from the spinnerets at its tip a jet, a flat jet of silk, which was caught up by the hind feet and wrapped around the fly as it was rolled over and over by the front feet. She tumbled it about, all the time wrapping it with the issuing band of silk, until it was completely enswathed. Then she left it fastened in the web, went back to the hub, and resumed her feeding on the first fly. But soon she finished this entirely, dropped the wreck out of the web and went out and got the second fly, bringing it back to the hub to eat.

"But why," asked Mary, "does Argiope wrap the fly up so carefully in silk? Why not just kill it by biting, and then leave it in the web until she wants it?"

"Perhaps," I answer, "she wants to make it helpless before she comes to close quarters with it. You notice she holds it away from her body with her fore feet and pulls the silk band out far with her hind feet so that her body does not touch the fly at all while she wraps it. Perhaps she is not sure that it isn't a bee or some other stinging insect. It buzzes loud enough to make me think it a bee."

So Mary and I decided to try some experiments with our Argiope to find out, if possible, first, if she could tell a bee from a fly, and second, if so, whether she treated it differently, and third, why she wraps her prey up so carefully before coming to too close quarters with it. We feel quite proud of these experiments because we seemed to be doing something really scientific; and we know that Experimental Zoology, that is, studying animals by experimenting with them, is quite the most scientific thing going nowadays among professional naturalists. So here are our notes exactly as we wrote them during our experimenting. This is, of course, the correct manner for publishing real scientific observations, because it gives the critical reader a chance to detect flaws in our technique!

OUR NOTES ON THE BEHAVIOR OF ARGIOPE

"Nov. 18, 4:45 p.m.; released a fly in the cage. The spider pounced upon it, seized it with fore and third pair of legs, threw out a band of silk and enswathed it, tumbling it over and over with her hind feet about thirteen times, hence enswathed it in thirteen wrappings of silk. The fly was then disconnected from the web, the spider making but little attempt to mend the gap. It was carried to the hub and eaten. While the feast was going on, a honey-bee [with sting extracted; we didn't want to run any risks with Argiope!] was liberated in the cage. As soon as it touched the web, the spider was upon it, throwing out a band of silk in a sheet a quarter of an inch broad. ['Drawing out' would be more accurate, for the spinnerets cannot spurt out silk; silk is drawn out and given its band character by lightning-like movements of the comb-toothed hind feet.] With her hind legs Argiope turned the bee over and over twenty-five or twenty-six times, thus enswathing it with twenty-five or twenty-six wrappings of the silken sheet.

"No sooner was the bee enswathed than a second bee was liberated in the cage and caught in the web. This was treated by the spider like bee No. 1.

"Nov. 20, 8:15 a.m.; Argiope perfectly still in center of hub, feeding on bee No. 2. The only thing that reveals the feeding is a slight moving of the bee's body as the juices are sucked up. Remains of bee No. 1 dropped to the bottom of the cage.

"Fed all day, 8:15 a.m. to 5 p.m., on bee No. 2.

"At 2:30 p.m., a box-elder bug, which is very ill-smelling, was thrown into the web. Argiope did nothing for three minutes, then went out on the web to it and wrapped, making five complete turns; then went away. Probably not hungry, as she has had two bees and a fly in three days.

"Nov. 21, 8:15 a.m.; box-elder bug finished during last night. Old web replaced by a new one with twenty-nine radii, eleven complete spirals and several partial spirals. The hub is formed of fine irregular webbing about an inch and a half in diameter, without the viscid droplets that cover the spirals. An open space of about a half-inch intervenes between the hub and the beginning of the spirals.

"4:30 p.m.; liberated a fly in the cage. Argiope pounced upon it and began to eat immediately, not taking time or trouble to enswath it.

"While the fly was being devoured, we liberated a strong-smelling box-elder bug in the cage. It flew into the web. Argiope, by a quick movement, turned on the hub toward the bug and stood in halting position for eight seconds, then approached the bug slowly, hesitated for a second or two, then wrapped it about with five wrappings, halted again, and finally finished with five more wrappings. The bug was then attached to the web where it had first touched, the spider passing back to the center and resuming her meal.

"When the fly was finished, Argiope walked over to the bug, grasped it in her mandibles, walked up to the hub, turned herself about so that her head was downward, manipulated the bug with her fore and third pair of feet until it seemed to be in right position for her with reference to the hub of the web, and began to feed.

"5 p.m.; bee liberated in cage with sting not extracted. Argiope leaped instantaneously to the spot where it was caught, enswathed it with great rapidity thirty-seven times, then bit at it, and enswathed it five times more, making forty-two complete wrappings in all, then left it fastened in the web and resumed feeding upon the bug. All the time she was wrapping it, Argiope kept her body well clear of the bee's body, the spinnerets being fully one-half an inch from the bee, making the broad band of issuing silk very noticeable. In biting it, which she seemed to do with marked caution, she of course had to bite through the silken covering.

"A few minutes later a second bee, with sting, was liberated in the cage, caught in the web and rapidly pounced on by the spider. As before, she turned it over and over with great rapidity, using apparently all of her legs. She enswathed it fifty times, bit it, and then wrapped it with five more silken sheets, making fifty-five wrappings in all. Leaving it hung to the web, she went back to the bug.

"Before Argiope had reached the bug, bee No. 3 was caught in the web at the exact spot where bee No. 2 was hung up. In its efforts to disentangle its feet, it shook the whole web violently. In spite of the violent vibration of the web, Argiope pursued her course to the bug at the hub of the web, adjusted herself with head downward, and resumed feeding.

"Query: Did Argiope think the web-shaking due to futile struggles of the well-wrapped bee No. 2, and hence needing no attention?

"Vibration of the web continued. After several seconds had elapsed, Argiope seemed suddenly to realize that her efforts were called for out on the web, for she pounced down as rapidly as before and rolled and tumbled both bees together, enswathing both in the same sheet of silk, never stopping until she had given them fifty-five wrappings. After biting twice, she wrapped them with five more turns, bit again, and wrapped again with seven more turns, making sixty-seven in all. Argiope then returned to her bug.

"Query: Does Argiope distinguish bees from flies?

"Further query: Does Argiope distinguish bees with stings from bees with stings extracted?

"Nov. 22, 9:45 a.m.; Argiope feeding at hub on bees Nos. 2 and 3 introduced into cage yesterday afternoon. With her right second leg she holds taut a line connected with bee No. 1.

"10:25 a.m.; packet dropped to the bottom of the cage, the juices of only one of the bees having been sucked out. The web is constructed at an angle so that anything dropped from the center falls free of it.

"5 p.m.; began feeding again on bee No. 1.

"Nov. 23, 9:30 a.m.; another bee released in cage, caught in web and enswathed approximately thirty turns by Argiope.

"Nov. 25, 8:30 a.m.; the web has been destroyed during the night.

"Nov. 26, Argiope has made an entirely new web.

"Nov. 30, 2 p.m.; gave Argiope a bee with sting. It was wrapped forty-seven times, but not so expeditiously as has been her wont. Later another bee was liberated in the cage, caught and wrapped about forty-five times.

"Dec. 2, 11 a.m.; the body of a live bee was bathed in fluid from the freshly crushed body of a box-elder bug [very malodorous], and the bee liberated in Argiope's cage, and soon caught in the web. The bee was not very lively and did not shake the web violently, but Argiope rushed to it without hesitation, wrapped it with twenty-five turns of silk and returned to the hub of the web.

"Dec. 3; Argiope stayed all day in the upper part of the web, on foundation lines, with head downward.

"Dec. 5; yesterday Argiope moved down to her normal place on the hub. To-day she is on the hub, but in reversed position [head up], and with legs bent and limp, not straight out and stiffened as usual.

"Dec. 6; Argiope hung all day from foundation lines of upper part of web, in reversed position [head up], with legs limp and bent.

"Dec. 7; Argiope hanging by first and second right legs, from upper part of web; barely alive.

"Dec. 8; Argiope dead."

[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.

Citrinus is one of a large number of brothers and sisters, more than fifty indeed, who were hatched from tiny reddish eggs which the mother laid under her own body. Before laying the eggs, Citrinus's mother had built a thin shell or roof of wax over her back, and after the eggs were laid she soon died and her body shriveled up, leaving the eggs safely housed under the waxen roof. When the baby Orange-dwellers were hatched, each had six legs and a delicate little sucking-beak projecting from his small plump body. Citrinus and his brothers and sisters scrambled out from under the wax shell and started out each for himself to explore the world. First, however, each thrust his beak into the leaf and took a good drink of sap. Then they were ready to begin their journeying. But a terrible thing happened!

Just as Citrinus was pulling his beak out of the soft leaf, he saw a great six-legged beast, in shape like a turtle, with shining red-and-black back and fearful snapping jaws. On each side of its head, which it moved slowly from side to side, it had an immense eye, which looked like a hemispherical window, with hundreds of panes of glass in it. The beast's legs were large and powerful, and on each foot there were two claws, each of them as long as the whole body of Citrinus. Truly this was an appalling sight, and all of the little Orange-dwellers ran as fast as they could, which, unfortunately, wasn't very fast. The beast leisurely caught up in its great jaws one after another of Citrinus's brothers and sisters, and crushed and tore their tender bodies to pieces and ate them!

Now this beast, which seemed so large to Citrinus, was what is to us a very small and pretty insect, one of the lady-bird beetles. These beetles care for no other food than plump Orange-dwellers and other equally toothsome small insects; and instead of being sorry for its victims, we are glad it eats them! This seems very cruel indeed, but there are so many, many millions of the Orange-dwellers all sucking the juice of orange-trees that although they are so small, and each one drinks so little sap, yet altogether they do a great amount of damage to the orange-trees, often killing all the trees in a large orchard. So the lady-birds are a great help to the orange-growers.

Little Citrinus escaped from the Beetle by crawling into a small, dark hole in the surface of the leaf; but he was badly frightened. This was his first experience with the terrible dangers of the world, with the struggle for life, which is going on so bitterly among the people of his kind, the insects. For although there would seem to be enough plants and trees to serve as food for all of them, many insects find it easier or prefer to eat other insects than to live on plant food. Now because the insects which live on plant food do injury to our fruit-trees and vegetables and grain crops by their eating, we call them injurious insects; while we call the insect-eating kinds beneficial insects, because they destroy the injurious insects.

But little Citrinus didn't look at the matter at all in this light. He thought the lady-bird beetle a very cruel and wicked being, and resolved to warn every Orange-dweller he met in his travels to beware of the cruel, turtle-shaped beast with the shining black-and-red back. As he wandered on from leaf to leaf along the tender twigs in the top of the tree, he met many other Orange-dwellers, whom he would have told all about the Beetle, but he found that all of them had had experiences as sad as his; in fact he soon learned that of all the Orange-dwellers who are born, only a very, very few escape the Beetles and other devouring beasts who pursue them. And he was highly indignant when one shrewd Orange-dweller told him that it really was a good thing for the race of Orange-dwellers that so many of them were killed. For, the shrewd Orange-dweller said, if all of us who are born should live and have families, and not die until old age came on, there would soon be so many of us that we should eat all the orange-trees in the world, and then we should all starve to death. And this is quite true.

Finally Citrinus came to a remarkable being, a very beautiful being indeed. It had two long, slender, waving feelers on its head, four large ball-shaped eyes, and, strangest of all, two delicate gauzy wings. This beautiful creature greeted Citrinus kindly and asked him where he was going. Citrinus, who was at first a little afraid of the strange creature, was reassured by its kind greeting, and answered simply, "I don't know. My brothers and sisters were all eaten by the Beetle; my father and mother I have never seen; and no one has told me where to go."

The stranger smiled a little sadly and said, "That is the common story among us Orange-dwellers. Our fathers and mothers always die before we are born. It is a great pity. Yes, before my little Orange-dweller children are born—"

"What," cried Citrinus, "are you an Orange-dweller; you, who are so different from me?"

"Indeed I am," replied the gauzy-winged creature. "I am an old Orange-dweller. Oh, I know it seems strange to you," he continued, noticing the look of astonishment on Citrinus's face, "but some day you will look just like me. You will have wings, and be able to fly; and will have long feelers on your head to hear and to smell with, and big eyes to see all around you with. You will have some strange experiences, though, before you become like me."

"But as I had started to say, we fathers, and the mothers too for that matter, always die before you youngsters are hatched out of your eggs. Now I shall probably die to-morrow or next day, because I have lived three days already, and that is a long time to live without eating."

Little Citrinus could hardly believe his senses. It was so wonderful. "But why don't you eat," urged Citrinus, who felt very badly to think of any one's going without food for three days. He always took a drink of sap every few minutes.

"Why, how absurd," replied the winged Orange-dweller, "don't you see I have nothing to eat with? No sucking-beak, no mouth at all. When I get my wings and my four eyes, I lose my mouth, and can't eat or drink any more."

This was incredible; but when Citrinus looked at the head of his companion, he saw it was perfectly true. He had no mouth. Citrinus gently waved his little sucking-beak, to be sure he still had it. Suddenly he began to cry; a sad thought had come to him. "And did my mother starve to death too?" he sobbed.

"Not at all, little one," rather impatiently exclaimed the other. Little Citrinus seemed to know so very little, indeed. "Your mother was not at all like me. When she was full-grown she had no wings, no legs, and no eyes, but she had a very long beak, and could suck up a great deal of orange-sap. If you will listen and not interrupt, I will tell you how we Orange-dwellers grow. When we are hatched from our eggs we are all alike, brothers and sisters. We each have a plump little body, six legs, two eyes, and a sucking-beak to get food with. We walk about for a few days, and finally stop on some nice green leaf or juicy orange, and stick our beaks far in and go to sleep, or do something very like it. We never walk about any more. Indeed, if you are a girl Orange-dweller you never leave this spot, but live all the rest of your life and die here. However, I am getting too far along in my story. While we are asleep we shed all of our skin, fold it up into a little ball or cushion and put it on our backs, together with some wax which comes out of small holes in our bodies. While shedding our skin we make a great change in our bodies. We lose our legs! So we simply remain where we went to sleep, with our beaks stuck into the leaf, sucking the sap. After a few days we go to sleep again, and again we shed our skins and fold them on our backs. But at this time something even more wonderful than before happens to our bodies. That is, to the bodies of the boy Orange-dwellers. For this time we lose our sucking-beaks, but we regain our six legs, and in addition we get a second pair of eyes, we find on our heads a pair of long, slender, hairy feelers, and, most pleasing of all, we have been provided with a pair of wings. Our wings are not yet full-grown or ready to fly with, so we still remain quietly in our resting-place for a few days longer, when we shed our skin once more, and then fly away, looking just as I do now. Our sisters, though, when they shed their skins the second time, make no change in their bodies, except to grow larger. They remain with their sucking-beaks thrust into the leaf. They keep increasing the size of the wax scale or shell over their backs, until they are entirely covered by it. Now they look just as your mother did. From above, all one can see is the flat circular wax scale with two spots on it, where the folded-up cast skins are. Underneath the scale lies the Orange-dweller, with its sucking-beak stuck into the sap, but with no legs or wings or long, hairy feelers. After a while she lays a lot of eggs under her body, and then dies. And soon the new family is born. Now this is the way we grow, and all of the wonderful things which have happened to me will happen to you,—if the Beetle does not get you."

With that the winged Orange-dweller flew away, and little Citrinus was left alone, wondering over the strange story. After taking a drink of sap from the leaf on which he was standing, he wandered aimlessly about until he came to a large yellow ball hanging from the branch, which gave out a delightful odor. Scrambling down the slender stem by which it was suspended, he walked out on to the shining surface of the orange; for, of course, that is what the yellow ball was. He tried a drink of sap from the ball and found it delicious. He decided to stay on the ball, the more readily as he was getting rather tired with his long traveling, and a sort of sleepy feeling was coming over him. So thrusting his beak far into the ball, he went to sleep. How long he slept he doesn't know, but when he awoke he could hardly believe his senses. He had no legs; and on his back there was a thin shell of wax and a little packet. He realized, too, that he was bigger than he was before he went to sleep. Then the strange story told him by the winged Orange-dweller came back to him, and he knew that the stranger had told the truth. The first great change had happened. He was delighted, for he thought it would be very pleasant to have wings and fly about wherever he wished, to see the world.

Suddenly a great shock came: his World trembled, then shook violently, and, with a quick wrench, started to move swiftly through space. Then came a stop, a series of shocks and curious whirlings, and then a filmy-white cloud settled down over it all, shutting out the sunlight and the blue sky. Finally there came a few more shocks and wrenches, and then total darkness and silence. Citrinus had held on to his world all through this, because his beak was still thrust into the fragrant surface, and now he felt thankful that he had come alive through these series of world catastrophes and convulsions and still had all the food he could possibly use.

After a few days, when Citrinus's world all nicely wrapped in tissue-paper and packed in a box with ninety-nine other similar worlds had traveled a thousand miles, the sunlight came again, and soon after came that greatest danger of all—that danger from which I saved him by staying my brother's hand in its ruthless rubbing off of the specks on his breakfast orange! Now Citrinus and Mary and I are all waiting impatiently for the day when he shall get his beautiful wings and his two pairs of eyes.

[THE DRAGON OF LAGUNITA]

When Mary and I came to examine our ant-lion dragon the day after our adventures among the Morrowbie Jukes pits, we found him dead in the bottle of sand. Perhaps his haughty spirit of dragon could not stand such ignominious bottling up, or perhaps there wasn't enough air. Anyway, His Fierceness was dead. His cruel curved jaws would seize and pierce no more foraging ants. His thirsty throat would never again be laved by the fresh blood of victims. Vale dragon!

But there are more dragons than one in our world. Not only more ant-lion dragons, but more other kinds of dragons. And this is one of the great advantages that Mary and I enjoy in our looking about in the fields and woods for interesting things. If we were looking for the dragons of fairy stories, we could only expect to find one kind—if, indeed, we could expect to find any kind at all in these days when so few fairies are left. If we could find it, however, it would be a monstrous beast in a forest cavern, with scaled body and clawed feet and great ugly head that breathed fire and smoke from its gaping mouth. That would be an interesting sort of dragon to see, we confess, more interesting than the great one, a hundred yards long, that we saw in a Chinese procession in Oakland, with two excited Chinamen jumping about in front of its head and jabbing at its eyes with spears. And more interesting than the one that roars and spits at Siegfried on the stage while the big orchestra goes off into wild clamors of O-see-the-dragon music. But we do not expect ever to find a real fairy-story dragon any more, and so we content ourselves with trying to find as many different kinds of real dragons as we can in our world of little folk on the campus. These dragons are rather small, but they are unusually fierce and voracious, to make up for their lack of size. And so they serve very well to interest us.

To make up for the death of the ant-lion dragon of the sand-pits, I promised to take Mary to see the Dragon of Lagunita. Or rather the dragons, for there are many in Lagunita, and indeed many in several other places on the campus. Have I explained that Lagunita is a pretty Spanish word for "little lake," and that our Lagunita is just what its name means, and besides is as pretty as its name? There is only one trouble about it. And that is, that every year, in the long, rainless, sun-filled summer, it dries up to nothing but a shallow, parched hollow in the ground, and all the dragons have to move. But this moving is a remarkable performance. For while during the spring the Lagunita dragons live rather inactively in their lairs under the water, when summer comes they all transform themselves into great flying dragons of the air, and swoop and swirl about in a manner very terrifying to see.

The morning we were to make our journey to Lagunita, I came to Mary's house with a rake over my shoulder.

"But what are you going to do with the rake?" said Mary.

"One doesn't go to seek a dragon without weapons," I replied with dignity. "And a rake is a much more formidable weapon in the hands of a man who knows how to rake than a gun in the hands of a man who doesn't know how to shoot." I am something of an amateur gardener, but not at all the holder of a record at clay pigeons nor king of a Schützen-verein. So I carried my rake.

"Then what weapon shall I carry?" asks Mary.

I ponder seriously.

"A tin lunch-pail," I finally reply.

"With luncheon in?" asks Mary.

"Empty," I say.

So we start.

I have already said that Lagunita is a pretty little lake. It lies just under the first of the foothills that rise ridge after ridge into the forested mountains that separate us from the ocean. Indeed, it is on the first low step up from the valley floor, and from its enclosing bank or shore one gets a good view of the level, reaching valley thickly set with live-oak trees and houses and fields. Around the little lake have grown up pines, willows and other beautiful trees, and at one side a tiny stream comes in during the wet season. There is no regular outlet, but the water which usually begins to come in about November keeps filling the shallow bowl of the lake higher and higher until by spring it is nearly bank full and may even overflow. Then as the long dry summer season sets in, the level of the water grows lower and lower until in August or September there is only left a small muddy puddle crammed with surprised and despairing little fishes and salamanders and water-beetles and the like, who are not at all accustomed to such behavior on the part of a lake. And then a few days later they are all gasping their last breaths there together on the scum-covered, waterless bottom.

But when Lagunita is really a lake, it is a very pretty one, and Mary and I love to go there and sit on the bank under the willows near the horse paddocks and watch the college boys rowing about in their graceful, narrow, long-oared shells. These swift-darting boats look like great water-skaters, only white instead of black. You know the long-legged, active water-skaters or water-striders that skim about over the surface of ponds or quiet backwater pools in streams in summer time?

So Mary and I went to Lagunita with our rake and tin lunch-pail to hunt for dragons. No shining armor; no great two-handed sword; no cap of invisibility. Just a rake and a tin lunch-pail.

"Where, Mary, do you think is the likeliest place for the dragon?" I ask.

Mary answers promptly, "There at the foot of the steep stony bank where the big willow-tree hangs over."

We go there. I grasp my rake firmly with both hands. I reach far out over the shallow water. Then I beat the rake suddenly down through the water to the bottom, and with a quick strong pull I drag it out, raking out with it a great mass of oozy mud and matted leaves. I drag this well up on shore, and both Mary and I flop down on our knees and begin pawing about in it. Suddenly Mary calls out, "I've got one," and holds up in her fingers an extraordinary, kicking, twisting creature with six legs, a big head, and a thick, ugly body on which seem to be the beginnings of several fins or wings. It has, this creature, two great staring eyes, and stout, sharp-pointed spines stick out from various parts of the body.

"Put him in the lunch-pail," I shout. I had already filled it half-full of water from the lake.

Then I found one; then Mary another, and then I still another. It was truly great sport, this dragon-hunting.

We put them all into the lunch-pail where they lay sullenly on the bottom, glaring at each other, but not offering to fight, as we rather hoped they would.

Then, what to do? These dragons in their regular lairs at the bottom of Lagunita might do a lot of most interesting things, but dredged up in this summary way and deposited in a strange tin pail in the glaring light of day, they seemed wholly indisposed to carry on any performances of dragon for our benefit. So we decided to take them home, and try to fix up for them a still smaller lakelet than Lagunita; one, say, in a tub! Then, perhaps, they would feel more at home and ease, and might do something for us.

So we took them home. And we fixed a tub with sand in the bottom, water over that, and over the top of the tub a screen of netting that would let air and sunlight in, but not dragons out. Then we collected some miscellaneous small water-beasties and a few water-plants, and put them in, and so really had a very comfortable and home-like place for the dragons. They seemed to take to it all right; we called our new lakelet Monday Pond, because of some relation between the tub and washday, I suppose, and we had very good fun with our dragons for several weeks. Think of the advantage of having your dragon right at home! If it is a bad day, or we are lazy, or there may be visitors who stay too long so there is only a little time for ourselves, how convenient it is to have a dragon—or indeed a whole brood of dragons—right in your study. Much better, of course, than to have to sail to a distant island and tramp through leagues of forest or thorny bushes or over burning desert or among spouting volcanoes to find your dragon, as most princes in fairy stories have to do.