THE ANTS. 



45 



a flood. But any one who engages in a battle of obstinacy 

 with ants should practise to suffer defeat gracefully, for he 

 will have to suffer it. They put me to the trouble of keeping 

 up this tin-pot practice for three or four days, without letting 

 me feel that I had put them to any trouble at all. Swept 

 away into the jaws of destruction, they were back again in 

 an hour with a few more. At length the emigrants appeared, 

 great lubberly things, fully an inch and a half long, with 

 wings, and not a notion of how to use them. The room was 

 soon full of them, crawling over each other, or making blun- 

 dering essays at aeronautics, which inevitably ended in a 

 butt against the wall. This brought on a fit of brain fever, in 

 which they spun on their heads like teetotums, or went sliding 

 with a buzz-z-z ! along the floor. Then the squirrels got scent 

 of the affair and came in to munch them up, and the lizards 

 swallowed them, and the hainal swept the residue out to the 

 chickens. So the colonizing scheme collapsed. To return, 

 however, to my story. There is in the same room a settle- 

 ment of those large black ants which come into the house 

 at this season and garrison cool damp corners. They are 

 truculent, hot-blooded ruffians, and will stomach no provo- 

 cation, so it is little wonder that the two parties came into 

 collision, especially at a time of such national excitement 



