48 THE TRIBES ON MY FRONTIER. 



acerbity, and, in fact, every feeling which is out of harmony 

 with " sweet reason," seems to have been boiled down, and 

 its quintessence extracted to compose the blood which 

 courses angrily through the hot veins of this creature. As 

 you pant up the red-dusty path, startling the jocund hill 

 bulbul, with dandy topknot and crimson whiskers, from its 

 breakfast among the berries, the red ant hears you afar off 

 and hurries along the outermost branch, to the very point of 

 the very longest leaf, and there stands on tiptoe, dancing 

 with impatience to bury its jaws in your flesh. And what a 

 knowledge it has of our geography ! What an instinct for 

 detecting tender places ! 



Industry is not to be learned from these. I believe they 

 lead idle lives and live on the milk of their flocks and herds. 

 In the month of May, when the cotrinda-bush is in fruit, 

 I have often noticed with pain that the choicest berries were 

 in possession of a garrison of red ants, which had enclosed 

 them in a sort of chamber by drawing the surround ing leaves 

 together and joining them with some spider's-web fabric 

 which they spin. This is not for the sake of the fruit. They 

 are not frugivorous. It is for the sake of the downy white 

 aphides, or plant-lice, on the fruit. These aphides yield a 

 sort of nectar, which is as delicious to an ant as camel's milk 



