Vernon L. Kellogg

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Although, as I have already said, there are eight different kinds of oak-trees growing in our valley and mountains, two of these kinds, the live-oaks and the white oaks, are by far the most common and numerous. As one stands upon the mountain tops or foothills and looks down and over the broad valley, all still and drowsy under the warm afternoon sun, it seems as if you were looking at a single great orchard with the trees in it in close-set regular lines and plots in some places, and irregularly scattered and farther apart in other places. ”

“ For tellers of fairy tales cannot even think of things as extraordinary and strange as the things that ants actually do!
But what a prosaic lecture this story of the animated honey-jars has come to be. Mary is long ago asleep, curled up in a big leather arm-chair in my study, and I sit here in the falling dusk, straining my bespectacled eyes to write what will, I am afraid, only put other little girls to sleep. Which is not at all my idea in writing this book. It is, indeed, just the opposite. It is to make anybody who reads it open his eyes. ”

“ We have seen the queen lay her eggs, the little bees hatch out, the nurse bees feed them, the foragers come in and dance their whirling dervish dance and unload their baskets of pollen and sacs of honey, the wax-makers hang in heavy festoons and make wax, the carrying bees carry the wax to the comb-builders, and the comb-builders build comb of it, the house-cleaners and the ventilators clean house and ventilate, and the guards stopping intruders at the door. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ No other kind of insect but the May-fly casts its skin once its wings are outspread. But now the May-fly is ready for its dizzy dance. And as it has only a few hours to do it in, it usually starts as soon as there [Pg 208] are any lights to dance about. Think of it, to come up from under the water, get your wings and be a real May-fly, not just a crawling thing on the bottom of a pond, and have only one evening to live in! Probably to dance the whole evening through is about the best thing to do under such circumstances."
"Don't any of the poor May-flies live for more than one evening?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And she must have been especially delighted when she went to the open door of the house for a peek out—for she wasn't allowed really to go outdoors for exactly eight days—and saw the beautiful arcades of the outer Quadrangle underneath her and the red-tiled roof on a level with her, and then the great eucalyptus trees and the beautiful live-oaks in the field beyond, and far off on the horizon the crest of the distant mountains, with the giant redwoods standing up against the sky-line. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [Pg 76] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Indeed we had planned Fuzzy's glass house and had had it built in the way you see it in Sekko's picture just so we could see plainly and certainly what goes on in the house of a bee family. Everybody has watched bees outside gather pollen and drink nectar and hang in great swarms, and do the various other things they do in their outdoor life. But not everybody has seen what goes on indoors. Many people have seen the inside of a hive every now and then. But it is always when the bees are greatly excited and often when the people are too. ”

“ 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 [Pg 10] 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. ”

“ As why it is that two galls made by two different kinds of gall-insects, but in the same parts, as leaves, of the same oak-tree, should be so different, or why the galls in different kinds of trees, though made by the same kind of insect, should be alike, as they usually are. And why with some kinds of the house-dwellers the children grow up to be different from the mother, but their own children grow up like the grandmother, and different from themselves. ”

“ These little white things are not ants' eggs, but ants' babies. They are the already hatched and partly grown young ants, the larvæ and pupæ, 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Once one of our swarms started down a chimney of a neighbor's house, and immensely surprised the good people by coming out, with a great buzzing, into the fireplace! And another swarm, not finding a suitable indoors place, simply began to build new combs hanging down from the branch of a cypress-tree in the Arboretum, and really made an outdoor home there, carrying on all the work of a bee-community for months. But usually a bee-swarm gets found by some bee-keeper and put into an empty hive. ”

“ 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?" ”

“ 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. ”

“ Was there any queen left in our hive? We knew there must be a queen with the swarm; bees don't go off without a queen. So if the old and new queen had fought and one had been killed, or if the workers had "balled" the new queen when she came out, there could be no queen left in the hive. Of course this would not be very serious. For there were many eggs and also many just-hatched bee-grubs in the brood-combs, and the workers could easily make a new queen. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The gall-insect is still alive inside, of course, but is perfectly quiet and is simply waiting. It is at this time in the life of the houses and their dwellers that Mary and I collect them and bring them home and put them into little tarlatan bags. This is autumn, the time that the trees in the East turn yellow and red, but in California do not. They just stay green, but get quiet or turn brown or simply drop off their leaves and stand bare. ”