138 THE RING OF NATURE 



Yonder, however, a mower has actually cut his 

 swathe short in mid field. He has skipped a portion 

 full half a dozen yards along, and has cut in again 

 beyond. I know the sign of old. Not mercy, but 

 fear, has prompted this departure from what 

 looked like an inexorable sweep. It is an almost 

 invisible menace that has put off the emblem of 

 Father Time and of Death. The grasses and the 

 flowers stand there as calm and as sweet as in any 

 other part of the field. Then a knautia bobs as 

 though a partial breeze had struck it, and we see 

 a tiny yellow body fly to and fro just where half 

 the moon daisies of a root are standing, the other 

 half lying low. It is there that our friend entered 

 a danger zone scarcely less visible or less real 

 than the marked area across which bullets fly. 

 At this point the wasps poured out from their 

 nest and made the stand that every patriot must 

 make somewhere, or lose his country. 



A little further on, the smaller city of the red- 

 tailed humble-bee has been taken in the mower's 

 stride without his having perceived it. The laden 

 merchants, returning one by one, have now accumu- 

 lated into a small crowd, anxiously seeking their 

 lost nest, and angrily exclaiming at the monstrous 

 thing that has befallen it. Where now is the 

 fabled instinct that, according to some, guides the 

 bee straight home ? They are searching an area 

 of a hundred square yards for the little nest they 

 have lived in for weeks. I end by finding it first, 

 a little heap of dry moss that the scythe almost 



