HONEY-DEW 159 



HONEY-DEW 



PLACE, the garden. Time, summer. Dramatis personae, 

 a couple of small brown garden-ants, and'a lazy clustering 

 colony of wee green ' plant-lice,' or ' blight,' or aphides. 

 The exact scene is usually on the young and succulent 

 branches of a luxuriant rose-bush, into whose soft shoots 

 the aphides have deeply buried their long trunk-like snouts, 

 in search of the sap off which they live so contentedly 

 through their brief lifetime. To them, enter the two 

 small brown ants, their lawful possessors"; for ants, too, 

 though absolutely unrecognised by English law (' de 

 minimis non curat lex,' says the legal aphorism), are 

 nevertheless in their own commonwealth duly seised of 

 many and various goods and chattels ; and these same 

 aphides, as everybody has heard, stand to them in pretty 

 much the same position as cows stand to human herdsmen. 

 Throw in for sole spectator a loitering naturalist, and you 

 get the entire mise-en-scene of a quaint little drama that 

 works itself out a dozen times among the wilted rose-trees 

 beneath the latticed cottage windows every summer 

 morning. 



It is a delightful sight to watch the two little lilliputian 

 proprietors approaching and milking these their wee green 

 motionless cattle. First of all, the ants quickly scent their 

 way with protruded antennae (for they are as good as blind, 

 poor things !) up the prickly stem of the rose-bush, guided, 



