Insect Stories

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.

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:

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 sauté, hopper au gratin, hopper escalloppé, hopper soufflé, and so on. The decision of the guests—those who lasted through the dinner—was that 'the dry and chippy character of the tibiæ 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.