■ THE CICADAS LAST SONG 2$ I 



rash ancestor of yours. Well, I will tell you, for 

 your own good. Guided by his noisy demonstra- 

 tion, the hornet spied him on his twig, and in a 

 second had pounced upon him and, like a high- 

 wayman, stabbed him to the heart with a poisoned 

 javelin. This cut short his song, as you may well 

 suppose, and he fell in the grasp of his assailant. 

 In another moment the hornet got a fresh hold 

 upon him, and though your ancestor, like yourself, 

 was much bigger than the hornet, those powerful, 

 buzzing wings made an easy burden of him for 

 quite a distance across the meadow. Here our 

 captor took a rest, and after tugging that helpless 

 cicada some distance up a high fence-rail, started 

 off on another fiio^ht, which was brought to an 

 end in the grass at the foot of a tree. In a mo- 

 ment more the hornet was seen tugging its huge 

 load up the trunk. When some ten feet in height 

 a third flight was made, this time gradually set- 

 tling down on the roof of a shed down-hill. Tug- 

 ging his game to the edge of the shed roof, a 

 fourth trip was made, and this landed the two in 

 the neighborhood of a sand bank at the roadside 

 in the valley below. 



A sand bank of some sort is usually the termi- 

 nus of this strange ride of the cicada. Thus far 

 many curious observers have followed the two, 

 and wondered what it was all about. If the\- had 

 cared to follow the matter to the end, they would 



