180 FRESH FIELDS 



might attack an elephant. They clung to his legs, 

 they mounted his back, and assaulted him in front. 

 As he rushed through and over their ranks, down 

 the side of the mound, those clinging to his legs 

 were caught hold of by others, till lines of four or 

 five ants w^ere being jerked along by each of his six 

 legs. The infuriated beetle cleared the mound, 

 and crawled under leaves and sticks to sweep off his 

 clinging enemies, and finally seemed to escape them 

 by burying himself in the earth. Then I took one 

 of those large, black, shelless snails with which this 

 land abounds, a snail the size of my thumb, and 

 dropped it upon the nest. The ants swarmed upon 

 it at once, and began to sink their jaws into it. 

 This woke the snail up to the true situation, and 

 it showed itself not without resources against its 

 enemies. Flee, like the beetle, it could not, but 

 it bore an invisible armor; it began to excrete from 

 every pore of its body a thick, whitish, viscid sub- 

 stance, that tied every ant that came in contact 

 with it, hand and foot, in a twinkling. When a 

 thick coating of this impromptu bird-lime had been 

 exuded, the snail wriggled right and left a few 

 times, partly sloughing it off, and thus ingulfing 

 hundreds of its antagonists. Never was army of 

 ants or of men bound in such a Stygian quagmire 

 before. New phalanxes rushed up and tried to 

 scale the mass; most of them were mired like their 

 fellows, but a few succeeded and gained the snail's 

 back; then began the preparation of another ava- 

 lanche of glue; the creature seemed to dwindle in 



