Chapter V: L. K (3)

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 _Schuetzen-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.

I can't, of course, venture to tell you of all the interesting things that Mary and I saw our dragons do. Two or three will have to do. Or my publisher will cry, "Cut it short; cut it short, I say." And that will hurt me, for he is really a most forbearing publisher, and quite in the way of a friend. The three things shall be, one, eating, and what with; two, getting a new skin, and why; and third, changing from an under-water, crawling, squirmy, ugly dragon into an aerial, whizzing, flashing, dashing, beautiful-winged dragon, and when. Of course one of the most important things about any dragon is what and how he eats; and the other most important thing about Mary's and my special kind of dragon is his remarkable change. This was to us much more remarkable than having three heads or even getting a new head every time an old one is cut off, which seems to be rather a usual habit of fairy-book dragons.

The dragons lay rather quietly on the sand at the bottom of Monday Pond most of the time. Sometimes one would be up a little way on the shore, that is, the side of the tub, or clinging to one of the plant-stems. When poked with a pencil,--and we were fearless about poking them, if the pencil were a long one,--they would half-walk, half-swim away. But mostly they lay pretty well concealed, waiting for something to happen. What would happen occasionally was this: a young May-fly or a water-beetle would come swimming or walking along; if it passed an inch away from the dragon, all right; but if its path brought it closer, an extraordinary "catcher," rather like a pair of long nippers or tongs, would shoot out like a flash from the head of the dragon and seize on the unfortunate beastie. Then the "catcher" would fold up in such a way as to bring the victim against the dragon's mouth, which is provided with powerful, sharp-toothed jaws. These jaws then had their turn. And that was the end of the May-fly.

Mary was rather shocked when she saw the dragon first use its "catcher." She wanted to rescue the poor May-fly. But after all she has got pretty well used to seeing tragedies in insect life. They seem to be necessary and normal. Many insects depend upon other animals for food, just as we do. Only fortunately we don't have to catch and kill our own steer or pig or lamb or chicken. We turn the bloody business over to men who like--well, at least, who do it for us. But in the world of lower animals each one is usually his own butcher.

Mary soon wanted to see the dragon's "catcher," and so we dredged one out of Monday Pond, and put him on the study-table. As he faced us with his big eyes glaring from his broad heavy head, he looked very fierce. But curiously enough, he didn't seem to have any jaws; nor even a mouth. The whole front of his face was smooth and covered over by a sort of mask, so that his terrible jaws and catching nippers were invisible. However, we soon understood this. The mask was the folded-up "catcher" so disposed that it served, when not in use, actually to hide its own iniquity as well as that of the yawning mouth behind. Only when some small insect, all unsuspecting this smooth masked face, comes close, do the long tongs unfold, shoot out, and reveal the waiting jaws and thirsty throat. A veritable dragon indeed; sly and cruel and ever hungry for living prey.

One day when we were looking into Monday Pond, Mary saw a curious object that looked more like a hollow dragon than anything else. It had all the shape and size of one of the dragons; the legs and eyes and masked face, the pads on the back that looked like half-fledged wings. But there was a transparency and emptiness about it that was uncanny and ghost-like. Then, too, when we looked more closely there was a great rent down the back. And that made the mystery plain. The real dragon, the flesh and blood and breathing live dragon, had come out of that long tear, leaving his skin behind! It was his complete skin, too, back and sides and belly, out to the tips of his feelers and down to his toes and claws.

"But why should he shed his skin? Hasn't he any skin now?" asked Mary.

"Of course he must have a skin. How could he keep his blood in, and what would his muscles be fastened to, for he is a boneless dragon, and his skeleton is his outside shell, with his muscles fastened to it? So how could he live at all without a skin? He must have a new skin."

And, of course, that was exactly it. He had cast his old skin, as a snake does, and had got a brand-new one. Why shouldn't a dragon change his skin if a snake can?

But Mary is persistent about her "whys," and I was quite ready for her next question, which came after a moment of musing.

"Why should he shed his old skin and get a new one? Is the new one different; a different color or shape or something?"

"No; not a different color or different shape especially, but a different size. The dragon is growing up. He is like a boy who keeps on wearing age-nine clothes until they are too short in the sleeves, too tight in the back, and too high-water in the legs. Then one day he sheds his age-nine suit and gets an age-eleven one. See?"

"What a funny professor you are! Is that the way you lecture to your classes?"

"Gracious, no, Mary! This is the way: As the immature dragon grows older, his constant assimilation of food tends to create a natural increase in size. But the comparative inelasticity of his chitinized cuticula prevents the actual expansion, to any considerable degree, of his body mass. Thus all the cells of the body become turgid, and altogether a great pressure is exerted outwards against the enclosing cuticular wall. This wall then suddenly splits along the longimesial line of the dorsum, and through this rent the dragon extricates itself in soft and defenceless condition, but of markedly larger size. The new cuticula, which is pale, elastic and thin at first, soon becomes thicker, strongly chitinized and dark. The old cuticle, or exuvia, which has been moulted, is curiously complete, and is a hollow or shell-like replica of the external appearance of the dragon even to the finest details. How is that, Mary?"

"Very instruct--instructing"--with an effort--"indeed," replies Mary, with grave face. "But I guess I understand the change from age-nine to age-eleven clothes better."

And then we saw the third wonderful happening in our dragon's life that I said we should tell about. We saw one of the dragons getting wings! That is, changing from an ugly, blackish, squat, crawling creature into a glorious long-bodied, rainbow-tinted, flying dragon. Another dragon had crawled up above the water on a plant-stem and was also "moulting its chitinized cuticula." But it was coming out from the old skin in very different shape and color. I had forgotten, when I told Mary that they only changed in size after casting the skin, about the last moulting. Each dragon casts its skin several times in its life, but the last time it does it, it makes the wonderful change I've already spoken about, from crawling to flying dragon. And it was one of these last skin-castings that was going on now under our very eyes.

I can't describe all that happened. You must see it for yourself some time. How, out of the great rent in the old skin along the back, the soft damp body of the dragon squeezes slowly out, with its constant revelation of delicate changing color and its graceful new shape; how out of the odd shapeless pads on the back come four, long, narrow, shining, transparent wings, with complex framework of fine little veins, or ribs, and thin flexible glassy membrane stretched over them; how the new head looks with its enormous, sparkling, iridescent eyes making nearly two-thirds of it and so cleverly fitted on the body that it can turn nearly entirely around on the neck. And then how the body fills out and takes shape, and the wings get larger and larger, and everything more and more beautifully colored! All this you will have to see for yourself some time when you have a Monday Pond in your own study, with a brood of dragons in.

"It _is_ wonderful, isn't it, Mary? How would you like to see twenty, thirty, forty, oh, a hundred dragons doing this all at once. We can if we want to. All we have to do is to go over to Lagunita some morning early, very early, just a little after sunrise--for that is their favorite time--and we shall see scores of dragons crawling up out of the water on stones, plants, sticks, anything convenient, and sloughing off their dirty, dark, old skins and coming out in their beautiful iridescent green and violet and purple new skins, with their long slender body and great flashing wings. They sit quietly on the stones and plant-stems until the warm rising sun dries them and their new skins get firm and all nicely fitted, and then they begin their new life,--wheeling and dashing over the lake and among the hills and bushes and above the grasses and grain along the banks. Like eagles and hawks they are seeking their prey. Watch that little gnat buzzing there in the air. A flying dragon swoops by and there is no gnat there any longer. It has been caught in the curious basket-like trap which the dragon makes with its spiny legs all held together, and it is being crushed and chewed by the great jaws. Still a dragon, you see, for all of its new beauty!"

Mary muses. "Not all beautiful things in the world are good, are they?" she murmurs.

"Mary, you are a philosopher," I say.

* * * * *

As I read this over I realize quite as keenly, I hope, as you do, my reader, how little there is in this story. And yet finding out this little was real pleasure to Mary and me. Now we must perforce estimate the pleasures and pains, the likes and dislikes, of other people by our own. And however untrue this estimate may be for any one other person, it must be fairly true for any considerable number of persons. Therefore--and this is the reason for putting down our simple experiences with the insects for other people to read and perhaps to be stirred by to see and do similar things--therefore, I say, other people, some other people, also must be able to get pleasure from what we do.

Now if there is any way and any means of getting clean pleasure into the crowded days of our living, then that way and means should be suggested and opened to as many as possible. Mary and I, you see, have the real proselyting spirit; we are missionaries of the religion of the unroofed temples. And we want all to be saved! So we give testimony willingly of our own experiences, and of the saving grace of our belief. We have no names for our idols, nor any formulation of our creed. But in various voice and word we do gladly confess over and over again the reality of the happiness that comes to us from our hours with the lowly world that we are coming to know better and better. And any one of these happy hours may contain no more than the little that has been told in this story of the "Dragon of Lagunita," and yet be really and truly a happy hour.

A SUMMER INVASION

"Are you comfortable, Mary?" I ask, "and shall I begin?"

"Yes; in just a minute," Mary replies; "I want to sit so that I can see both ways, Lagunita that way and the brown field with the tarantula holes that way," and she sweeps half the horizon with a chubby hand.

We are half-sitting, half-lying, in the shade at the base of a live-oak on a little knoll back of the campus, whence we can look down on the red-tiled roofs and warm buffy walls of the Quadrangle, and on beyond to the Arboretum with its great eucalyptuses sticking out above the other trees. We can catch glimpses of the bay, too, and of the white houses of the caretakers of the oyster-beds perched on piles above the water like ancient Swiss lake-dwellers.

Strolling about over the brown field of the tarantula holes and carrying bundles of sticks, and stooping down now and then to strike at the ground with one of the sticks, are several young men, Sophomores by their hats, and one of them with a red jacket on:

"Gowfin' a' the day,
Daein' nae wark ava';
Rinnin' aboot wi' a peck o' sticks
Efter a wee bit ba'!"

Mary recites this in a pretty singsong.

"Why, Mary, where did you learn that?" I ask in surprise.

"From the Scotch lady that I take of."

"Take of! What is it you take of her? I hope not measles or smallpox, or--"

"Why no, of course not. Music. That's what all young ladies take."

"Oh, I see! It _is_ catching, isn't it? I have seen some bad cases, especially in small towns. Every young lady, even just girls"--I glance sidewise at Mary--"down with it. But is that what those boys over there are doing? I hope they won't interfere with the tarantulas. They probably don't know what lively times there are at nights in that field. Scores of big black tarantulas racing about, hunting, and hundreds of beetles and things racing about, trying to keep from being eaten. Well, I'd better begin, because we have to get back by luncheon time. I have a most profound lecture to give on Orthogenesis and Heterogenesis to that unfortunate Evolution class at two o'clock."

"I'm all ready," said Mary, looking up at me with confidence. _She_ appreciates the kind of lectures I give outdoors, even if the lunch-gorged students don't appreciate my efforts _ex cathedra_.

"Well this summer invasion that I promised to tell you about happened when I was a boy in a little town in Kansas. It was in Centennial year; the one-hundredth anniversary of the freedom of the United States, and the summer of the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia.

"I was going down town one day in July to buy some meat for dinner. I was going because my mother had sent me. Naturally this promised to be a very uninteresting excursion. But you never can tell.

"When I had got fairly down to Commercial Street, I saw that all the people were greatly excited. Some were talking loudly, but most were staring up toward the sun, shading their eyes with their hands. Then I heard old Mr. Beasley say: 'That's surely them all right; doggon, they'll eat us up.'

"My heart jumped. Who could be coming from the sun to eat us up? I burst into excited questions. 'Who are coming, Mr. Beasley? I can't see anybody.'

"'Hoppers is coming boy; see that sort o' shiny thin cloud up there jest off the edge o' the sun? Well, them's hoppers.'

"'But how'll they eat us up, Mr. Beasley? No grasshopper can eat me up.'

"'They'll eat us up with their doggoned terbaccy-spittin' mouths; thet's how. And they'll eat _you_ up by eatin' everything you want to eat; thet's how, too. Havin' nothin' to eat is jest about the same as bein' et, accordin' to the way I looks at things.'

"It is evident that Mr. Beasley was a philosopher and a pessimist; that is, a man who sees the disagreeable sides of things, who doesn't see the silvery lining to the dark clouds. In fact, in this particular case Mr. Beasley was seeing a very dark lining to that silvery cloud 'jest off the edge o' the sun.'

"I stared at the thin shining cloud for a long time, wondering if it were really true that it was grasshoppers. People said the silvery shimmer was made by the reflection of the sunlight from the gauzy wings of the hosts of flying insects. It occurred to me that if the hoppers were just off the edge of the sun, they would all be burned up, or at least have their wings so scorched that they would fall to the ground. However, as the sun is 90,000,000 miles away from the earth, it would take a very long time for the scorched grasshoppers to fall all the way. I guessed that we might have a rain of dead and crippled hoppers about Christmas-time. Anyway there were no grasshoppers now, dead or alive, in the street. And I decided, rather disappointedly, that we probably shouldn't get to see any of the live hoppers at all. Then I asked Mr. Beasley where they came from.

"'Rocky Mountains,' he answered, shortly.

"This seemed a bit steep, for the nearest of the Rocky Mountains are nearly a thousand miles west of Kansas. And to think of grasshoppers flying a thousand miles! A bit too much, that was. Still I thought I ought to go home and tell the folks. But mother interrupted me in my picturesque tale with a dry request for the meat. Oh, yes. Oh--well, I had forgotten. So the first disagreeable result for me from the grasshopper invasion of Kansas in the summer of 1876 was a painful domestic incident.

"But Mr. Beasley was right. The grasshoppers had come. Next morning all the boys were out, each with a folded newspaper for flapper and a cigar-box with lid tacked on and a small hole just large enough to push a hopper through cut in one end. The rumor was we were to be paid five cents for every hundred hoppers, dead or alive, that we brought in. As a matter of fact nobody paid us, but we worked hard for nearly half a day; that is as long as it was fun and novelty. By noon the grasshoppers were an old story to us. And besides there were too many of them. Hundreds, thousands, millions,--oh, billions and trillions I suppose. And all eating, eating, eating!

"First all the softer fresher green things. The vegetables in the little backyard gardens; the sweet corn and green peas and tomato-and potato-vines. Then the flowers and the grasses of the front yards. Then the leaves of the dooryard trees. Then the fresh green twigs of the trees! Then the bark on the younger branches!!

"And you could hear them eat! Nipping and crunching, tearing and chewing. It got to be terrible, and everybody so downcast and gloomy. And the most awful stories of what was going on out in the great corn-fields and meadows and pastures. Ruin, ruin, ruin was what the hoppers were mumbling as they chewed.

"And then the reports from the other states in the great Mississippi Valley corn-belt came in by telegraph and letter. Over thousands and thousands of square miles of the great granary of the land were spread the hordes of hoppers. Farmers and stockmen were being ruined. Then the storekeepers and bankers that sell things and lend money to the farmers. Then the lawyers and doctors that depend on the farmers' troubles to earn a living. Then the millers and stock-brokers and capitalists of the great cities that make their fortunes out of handling and buying and selling the grain the farmers send in long trains to the centers of population. Everybody, the whole country, was aghast and appalled at the havoc of the hopper.

"What to do? How long will they keep up this devastation? Have they come to settle and stay in Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa? What will the country do in the future for corn and wheat and pigs and fat cattle?

"Well, it would be too long a story to tell of how all the entomologists went to work studying the grasshoppers and their ways: their outsides and insides, their hopping and their flying, their egg-laying and the growth and development of the little hoppers; how the birds, and what kinds, stuffed on them, and the robber-flies and the tachina flies and the red mites and the tiny braconids and chalcids attacked them and laid eggs on them, and their grubs burrowed into them; and everything else about them. But all the time the hoppers kept right on eating; at least they did where there was anything left to eat. Stories were told of their following roots of plants and trees down into the ground to eat them; of how they stripped great trees of bark and branches; of how they massed on the warm rails of railroads at nights and stopped trains; of how enterprising towns by offering rewards to farmers collected and killed with kerosene great winrows and mounds composed of innumerable bushels and tons of grasshoppers.

"Some people of active mind and fertile imagination suggested that if the grasshoppers were going to eat up all our usual food, we should learn to eat _them_! And they got chemists to figure out how much proteids and carbohydrates and hydrocarbons and ash, etc., there was in every little hopper's body. And there was a remarkable dinner given in St. Louis by a famous entomologist to some prominent men of that city, in which grasshoppers were served in several different ways: hopper _saute_, hopper _au gratin_, hopper _escalloppe_, hopper _souffle_, and so on. The decision of the guests--those who lasted through the dinner--was that 'the dry and chippy character of the tibiae was a serious objection to grasshoppers as food for man.'

"But you want to know the end of it Mary, don't you? Well, it was a very simple end. Simply, indeed, that the hoppers went back! Yes, actually, when autumn came they all--that is, all that hadn't been eaten by birds and toads and lizards, or collected by farmers and burned, or hadn't got walked on by horses and people, or hadn't got studied to death by entomologists--flew up into the air and sailed back to the Rocky Mountains. Or at least they started that way. I never heard if any of them really got all the thousand of miles back. But whereas in the summer they had all been flying southeast, in the fall they all began flying northwest.

"But some of them had laid eggs in the ground in little cornucopia-like packets before dying or flying away. And much alarm was caused by predictions that millions of new hoppers would come out of the ground in the coming spring and eat all the crops while young, even if the old ones or more like them didn't come again in the summer and eat the mature crops. But these predictions were only partly fulfilled. Not many hatched out in the spring, and those that did seemed to be more anxious to get back to the Rocky Mountains where their brethren were than to eat the Kansas crops. Indeed as soon as the young hoppers got their wings--and that takes several weeks after they come from the egg--they began flying northwest.

"So this remarkable and terrible invasion was over. And all the poor farmers, and the bankrupt or about to be bankrupt storekeepers and bankers and the idle lawyers and doctors and the terrified capitalists and the hard-studying entomologists drew a long breath of relief together."

"But have the hoppers come back any time since 1876?" asks Mary.

"No, that was the last invasion. There had been earlier ones, though, one or two of them just as bad as the Centennial-year one. Indeed Kansas was called the Grasshopper State on account of these terrible summer invasions. There was a bad one in 1866 and another in 1874. The invasions of 1874 and 1876 cost the farmers of the Mississippi Valley at least fifty millions of dollars in crops eaten up."

"But what made them come to Kansas? Why didn't they stay in the Rocky Mountains? It's much more beautiful and interesting there than in Kansas, isn't it?"

"Much, Mary. But it probably wasn't a matter of scenery with these tourist hoppers. Much more likely a matter of food. In those days there were no farmers with irrigated fields on the great plateaus along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and Wyoming. Nothing much but sage-brush and not overmuch of that grew there. And probably there simply wasn't enough food for all the hoppers. So in seasons when there were too many hoppers or too little food--and if there was one, there was also the other--they flew up into the air, spread their broad wings and sailed away on the winds from the northwest for a thousand miles to Nebraska and Kansas and Texas. And that made an invasion."

"But, then, why didn't they stay there, where there were corn-fields and wheatfields and vegetables?" persisted Mary.

"Mary, I can only tell you what the hard-studying entomologists decided about this, and published along with all the other things they found out, or thought they did, in several big volumes devoted to the grasshoppers. They found out that the hoppers tried to go back because they couldn't stay! That is, odd as it may seem, either the climate or the low altitude or something else uncomfortable about Kansas and Missouri disagrees with the Rocky-Mountain hoppers and they can't live there permanently. They can't raise a family there successfully; at least it doesn't last for more than one generation. They have to live on the high plateaus of the northern Rockies, but they can get on very well for a single summer away from home. Then they must get back if they can. And so it was that the hoppers that came to Kansas solved the weighty problem and relieved the great anxiety of the farmers and the whole country in general as to what was to become of the great grain-fields of the Middle West, by going back home again.

"And will they ever evade Kansas again?"

"That, Mary, is not a question for a stick-to-what-is-known scientific person like me to answer. But as ever since farms and grain-fields and vegetable gardens have been established on the Rocky Mountain plateaus by the farmers who keep moving west, the hoppers haven't come back to Kansas, and as this is probably because they have enough food at home in these Colorado and Wyoming fields, I should be very much surprised if they ever come back to Kansas again."

"Yes, but weren't you surprised that first time you saw them in the Sentinel year?"

"Mary, you are a quibbler. Well, then, I'll say that I don't think they'll ever make another foreign invasion. There!"

It is time for us to stroll home for luncheon. As we get up from under the live-oak, a stumpy-bodied little grasshopper whirs away in front of us.

"To think that such a little thing could make a summer evasion one thousand miles away from here," said Mary.

"Much littler things have done much bigger things," I reply, with my serious manner of lecturer-after-luncheon.

A CLEVER LITTLE BROWN ANT

We were sitting in the warm sun on the very tip-top of Bungalow Hill. This is a gentle crest that rises three hundred and fifty feet above the campus level, and gives one a wonderful view far up and down the beautiful valley and across the blue bay to the lifting mountains of the Coast Range. Square-shouldered old Mt. Diablo standing as giant warder just inside the Golden Gate, the ocean entrance to California, looms massive and threatening directly to our east, while to its south stretches the long brown range with its series of peaks, Mission, Mt. Hamilton, Isabella, and so on, way down to the twin Pachecos that guard the pass over into the desert. In the north rises Mt. Tamalpais, the wonderful fog mountain that looks down on the busy life at its feet of San Francisco, and its clustering child cities growing up rapidly these days, while the mother is lying ill of her wounds by earthquake and conflagration. To the south stretch the long orchard leagues of the Santa Clara Valley, with the little white spots of towns peeping out from the massed trees so jealous of every foot of fertile ground. And to the west--ah, that is the view that Mary and I lie hours long to look at and drink in and feel,--"our view," we call it.

We think we see things there that other people cannot. We see these things especially well when we half-close our eyes, and describe what we see in a sort of low, drowsy, monotone murmur. Then the fringe of towering spiry redwoods along the crest of the mountain range that lies between us and the great ocean and lifts its forested flanks full two thousand feet above us, becomes a long row of giants' spears sticking up above the battlements of a mighty castle. And the shadow-filled somber slashes and tunnel-like holes of the dropping canons are the great entrances and doors to this castle. At our feet the broad shallow canada that stretches all along the foot of the mountains and was made ages ago by some tremendous earthquake seems, seen through our half-closed eyes, to be full of water and to be really a broad moat shutting off all access to the castle.

The giants themselves we have never yet seen. But some day when the light is just right, and they are stirring themselves to look out at the world, we probably shall. Perhaps if we had been up here that day not long ago when the last earthquake came, we should have seen the giants looking out to see who was knocking at their gates. For it will take an earthquake's knocking ever to be felt in the heart of that mountain castle where the giants keep themselves.

The air was so clear this day that it seemed as if we could see each individual great redwood, each red-trunked, glossy-leaved madrono, each thicket of crooked manzanita and purpling Ceanothus, on the whole mountain side. Straight across through the clear blue-tinged atmosphere above the canada to the shoulders and canons, the forests and clear spaces and chaparral of the mountain flanks, we look. And it rests our eyes that are so tired of reading. It is good to be a-stretch on sunbathed Bungalow Hill this afternoon in October. The rains will be coming in a few weeks and then we can't be out so much. Or at any rate we can't lie close to the warm, brown, dry earth as we can now. But the rains will bring the fresh, green grasses and the flowers. If they come early enough the manzanitas will have on their little trembling pink-white lily-of-the-valley bells by Christmas-day, and the wild currants will be all green-and-rose color, with little leaves and a myriad fragrant blossoms.

But Mary has found something. She had turned over a little flattish stone and under it was--life! Living things disturbed in their work, their play, their laying up of riches, their care of their children; little animate creatures revealed in all the intimacies of their housekeeping and daily life.

But they didn't lose their presence of mind, these active, knowing little ants, when the Catastrophe came. There was work to be done at once and wisely. First, the saving of the children; and so in the moment that passed between Mary's overturning of the stone and our immediate shifting into comfortable position on our stomachs, head in hands, for watching, half of the racing workers had each a little white parcel in its jaws and was speeding with it along the galleries toward the underground chambers.

"Ants' eggs," said Mary.

"No," said I. "That's a popular delusion. These little white things are not ants' eggs, but ants' babies. They are the already hatched and partly grown young ants, the larvae and pupae, which are so well looked after by the nurse ants. For these young ants are quite helpless, like young bees in the brood-cells in a honey-bee hive. And they have to be fed chewed food, and as they have no legs and so can't walk, they have to be carried from the cool dark nurseries up into the warmer lighter chambers for air and heat every day almost, and then carried back down again. See how gently the nurse ant holds this baby in its jaws; jaws that are sharp and strong and that can bite fiercely and hold on grimly in battle."

And I hand Mary my little pocket-lens through which she tries to look with both eyes at once. She could, of course, if she would keep her blessed eyes far enough away, but as she persists in holding the glass at the tip of her nose as she has seen me do, and as she cannot shut one eye and keep the other open, as I can, and have done now so many years that I have wrinkles all round the shut-up eye, why, she makes bad work of it. So she hands back the lens with a polite "thank you," and sticks to her own keen unaided eyes. And sees more than I do!

For in the next breath she cries, with a little note of triumph in her voice: "But some of the ant babies _are_ walking. See there! And you said they have no legs. I can see them; little stumpy blackish legs sticking out from their soft white body! And some of the ants are carrying these babies with legs; I can see them!"

I squirm around nearer Mary. True enough there are some little white chubby creatures walking slowly around in the narrow runways. But I _know_ they cannot be ant larvae. For ant larvae have no legs and simply can't walk. What are they? I get out the little pocket-lens. And the mystery is solved. They are the "ant-cattle," the curious little mealy-bugs that many kinds of ants bring into their nests and take care of for the sake of getting from them a constant supply of "honey-dew." This "honey-dew" which the mealy-bugs make and give off from their bodies is a sweetish syrupy fluid of which almost all ants, even those most fiercely carnivorous, are very fond. And as the mealy-bugs and plant-lice that make the honey-dew are quite defenceless, soft-bodied, mostly wingless and rather sedentary insects, the bright-witted ants establish colonies, or "herds," of them in their nests, or visit and protect colonies of them living on plants near the ant-nest. Some kinds of ants even build earthen "sheds," or tents, over groups of honey-dew insects on plant-stems. The mealy-bugs are white because they cover their soft little bodies with delicate threads or flakes of glistening white wax which they make in their bodies and pour out through tiny openings in the skin.

We watch the busy, excited ants until they have carried all their babies and cattle down into the underground nursery chambers, out of harm's way. Then we put the stone carefully back in place, and roll back again to where we can watch the wonderful mountains in the west. The redwood-fringed crest stands so sharply out against the sky-line that we really can distinguish every tree that lifts its head above the crest, although they are several miles away from us. These great trees, which are the giants' jagged spears, are one hundred and fifty feet high, some of them, and as big around at the base as one of the massive columns in the Cologne Cathedral.

Finally I say, rather lazily, "Mary, shall I tell you about the special way the clever little brown ant of the Illinois corn-fields takes care of its cattle?"

"Yes, please, if it isn't too long," says Mary.

Mary and I are on perfectly frank terms. We are polite, but also inclined to be honest. And Mary is not going to be an unresisting victim of a garrulous old professor. But Mary need not be afraid that I sha'n't know when I am boring her. We have wireless communication, Mary and I. That's one, probably the principal, reason why we are such good companions. No true companionship can possibly persist without wireless and wordless communication.

"All right," I answer, "here goes, Mary. Say when!"

"I forget how many millions of bushels of corn were raised in the state of Illinois last year, but they were very many. And that means thousands and thousands of acres of corn-fields. Now in all these corn-fields there live certain tiny soft-bodied insects called corn-root aphids. Their food is the sap of the growing corn-plants which they suck from the roots. Although each corn-root aphid is only about one-twentieth of an inch long and one-twenty-fifth of an inch wide and has a sucking-beak simply microscopic in size, yet there are so many millions of these little insects all with their microscopic little beaks stuck into the corn-roots and all the time drinking, drinking the sap which is the life-blood of the corn-plants that they do a great deal of injury to the corn-fields of Illinois and cause a great loss in money to the farmers.

"So the wise men have studied the ways and life of these little aphids to see if some way can be devised to keep them in check. The aphids live only two or three weeks, but each one before it dies gives birth to about twelve young aphids. Now this is a very rapid rate of increase. If all the young which are born live their allotted two or three weeks and produce in their turn twelve new aphids, we should have about ten trillion descendants in a year from a single mother aphid. Ten trillion corn-root aphids, tiny as they are, would make a strip or belt ten feet wide and two hundred and thirty miles long!

"Some other kinds of aphids multiply themselves even more rapidly. An English naturalist has figured out that a single-stem mother of the common aphis, or 'greenfly' of the rose, would give origin, at its regular rate of multiplication and provided each individual born lived out its natural life, which is only a few days at best, to over thirty-three quintrillions of rose aphids in a single season, equal in weight to more than a billion and a half of men. Of course such a thing never happens, because so many of the young aphids get eaten by lady-bird beetles and flower-fly larvae and other enemies before they come to be old enough to produce young.

"However, besides this rapid increase of the corn-root aphids, there is something else that helps them to be so formidable a pest. And this is that they find very good and zealous friends in the millions of little brown ants that also live in the Illinois corn-fields. These swift, strong, brave little ants make their runways and nests all through the corn-fields, and are very devoted helpers of the soft-bodied helpless aphids. For the aphids pay for this help by acting as 'cattle' for the ants.

"This is what Professor Forbes, a very careful and a very honest naturalist, found out about the ants and the aphids. The eggs of the aphids, hosts of shining black, round, little seed-like eggs, are laid late in the autumn. These eggs are gathered by the ants and heaped up in piles in the galleries of their nests, or sometimes in special chambers made by widening the runways here and there. All through the winter these eggs are cared for by the ants, being carried down into the deeper and warmer chambers in the coldest weather, and brought up nearer the surface when it is warm. When the sunny days of spring begin to come, the eggs are even brought up above ground and scattered about in the sunshine, then carried down again at night. The little ants may be seen sometimes turning the eggs over and over and carefully licking them as if to clean them of dust-particles.

"In the late spring the aphid eggs hatch, and the young must have sap to drink right away. Their little beaks are thirsty for the plant-juices that are their only food. But there are no tender corn-roots ready for them in the fields because the corn has not yet been planted. What, then, shall the hungering baby aphids and their foster-mothers, the little brown ants, do?

"This is what happens. Although it is too early yet for the corn to be growing, there are various kinds of weeds that begin to sprout with the coming on of spring, and two of these, especially, the smart-weed and the pigeon-grass, abundant and wide-spread in all the Mississippi Valley, are sure to be growing in the fields. While the aphids much prefer corn-roots to live on, they will get along very well on the roots of smart-weed or pigeon-grass. So the clever little brown ants put the almost helpless baby aphids on the tender roots of these weeds, and there their tiny beaks begin to be satisfied. Don't you call that clever, Mary?"

"Clever! Gracious!" says Mary. "Do you know Professor Forbes? Is he really--does he always tell the--"

I interrupt. I am sensitive about such questions. I answer rather sharply. "Yes, I _do_ know him; and yes, he always tells the truth. Don't interrupt any more, please, for there is still more of the story." Mary is silent.

"Well, the aphids stay on the smart-weed roots until the corn is planted, which is in about ten days, and the kernels begin to germinate and to send down the tender juice-filled roots. And then the little brown ants take the aphids, now getting larger and stronger, of course, but still too helpless or stupid to do much for themselves except to suck sap, and carry them from the smart-weed roots to the corn-roots--What's that, Mary?"

But Mary had said nothing; just drawn in her breath with a little sound. Still I think it best to remind her that I _do_ know Professor Forbes and that he really _does_ always tell the truth. In fact, I quote to Mary this honest professor's exact words about this transfer of the aphids from the weed-roots to the corn-roots. This is what he writes in his intensely interesting account of the whole life of these little insects: "In many cases in the field, we have found the young root aphis on sprouting weeds (especially pigeon-grass) which have been sought out by the ants before the leaves had shown above the ground; and, similarly, when the field is planted to corn, these ardent explorers will frequently discover the sprouting kernel in the earth, and mine along the starting stem and place the plant aphids upon it."

"And the little brown ants do all this so as to get honey-dew from the aphids?" asks Mary.

"Exactly," I reply. "The ants take such good care of the aphids not because they pity their helplessness or just want to be good, but because they know, by some instinct or reason, that these are the insects that, when they grow up, make honey-dew, which is the kind of food that ants seem to like better than any other. Indeed not only the little brown ants alone take care of the corn-root aphids to get honey-dew, but at least six other kinds of ants that live in the Illinois corn-fields do it. But the little brown ants are the most abundant and seem to give the aphids the best care."

"It is exactly like keeping cows, isn't it," says Mary. "But they don't have to milk them."

"Well," I reply, "I don't know what you would call it, but some other ants that take care of some other kinds of honey-dew insects seem to have to carry on a sort of milking performance to make them pour out their sweet liquid. The ants have to pat or rub them with their hairy little feelers; sort of tickle them to get them to squeeze out a little drop of honey-dew. The truth is, Mary, if I should tell you the really amazing things that ants do, you simply wouldn't believe me at all. But the next time we go out, I'll take you to see for yourself an ant community right on the campus that does some remarkable things. I'd much rather have you see the things yourself than tell you about them."

"I'd rather, too," says Mary, which isn't exactly the nicest thing she could say, but I know what she means. It's that seeing is better than being told by anybody.