ANTS. 



" Go to the ant, thou sluggard ; consider her ways and be wise : 

 which having no guide, overseer or ruler, provideth her meat in the 

 summer and gathereth her food in the harvest." 



FOR the measured melody of these lines, which come 

 to us like a beautiful song heard in childhood and ever 

 since forgotten, we must give credit to King James' 

 scholars, but I like to think, in spite of what the higher 

 critics say, that the sense is King Solomon's, and that he, 

 the Augustus of the Jewish empire, found time amid all 

 his multifarious duties to get down on his hands and knees 

 in the back yard and watch the busy emmets at their 

 work. When you remember that he was the chairman of 

 the building committee of the temple, and any parish 

 vestryman knows what that means ; when you remember 

 that he was judge of his people as well as their king, and 

 had to hear police-court cases and make Mrs. Ryan stop 

 calling Mrs. Cassidy out of her name up the air-shaft ; 

 when you remember that he wrote a thousand and 

 five songs and three thousand proverbs (hardest things 

 in the world to get right; poetry is nothing to them) ; 

 that he spake of trees, from the cedar that is in Lebanon 

 even to the hyssop that springeth out of the wall, he spake 

 also of beasts and fowl and of creeping things, and of 

 fishes ; and when you remember that on top of all he had 

 a large and expensive family to keep, seven hundred 



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