HORNETS 141 



Britain and Europe, is not only large and splendid for 

 a northern insect, since he is not surpassed in lustre 

 by any of his representatives in other parts of the 

 globe. 



I admire and greatly respect him, this last feeling 

 dating back to my experience of wasps during my early 

 life in South America. When a boy I was one summer 

 day in the dining-room at home by myself, when in 

 at the open door flew a grand wasp of a kind I had 

 never seen before, in size and form like the hornet, 

 but its colour was a uniform cornelian red without any 

 yellow. Round the room it flew with a great noise, 

 then dashed against a window-pane, and I, greatly 

 excited and fearing it would be quickly gone if not 

 quickly caught, flew to the window, and dashing out 

 my hand, like the wonderfully clever parson- collector, I 

 grasped it firmly by the back with finger and thumb. 

 Now, I had been accustomed to seize wasps and bees 

 of many kinds in this way without getting stung, but 

 this stranger was not like other wasps, and quickly 

 succeeded in curling his abdomen round, and planting 

 his long sting in the sensitive tip of my forefinger. 

 Never in all my experience of stings had I suffered 

 such pain ! I dropped my wasp like the hottest of 

 coals, and saw him fling himself triumphantly out of 

 the room, and never again beheld one of his kind. Even 

 now when I stand and watch English hornets at work 

 on their nests, coming and going, paying no atten- 

 tion to me, a memory of that hornet of a distant land 



