282 The Dying Year [FIFTH WEEK 



on the trail, and they drink and drink of the sweets until 

 they become almost incapable of flying. But, after all, 

 the new lease of life is a vain semblance of better things. 

 Their eggs have long since been laid and their mission in 

 life ended, and at the best their existence is but a matter 

 of days. 



It is a sad thing this, and sometimes our heart hardens 

 against Nature for the seeming cruelty of it all. Forever 

 and always, year after year, century upon century, the 

 same tale unfolds itself, the sacrifice of the individual 

 for the good of the race. A hundred drones are tended 

 and reared, all but one to die in vain; a thousand seeds 

 are sown to rot or to sprout and wither; a million little 

 codfish hatch and begin life hopefully, perhaps all to 

 succumb save one ; a million million shrimp and pteropods 

 paddle themselves here and there in the ocean, and every 

 one is devoured by fish or swept into the whalebone 

 tangle from which none ever return. And if a lucky one 

 which survives does so because it has some little advan- 

 tage over its fellows, some added quality which gives just 

 the opportunity to escape at the critical moment, then the 

 race will advance to the extent of that trifle and so carry 

 out the precept of evolution. But even though we may 

 owe every character of body and mind to the fulfilment of 

 some such inexorable law in the past, yet the witnessing 

 of the operation brings ever a feeling of cruelty, of injustice 

 somewhere. 



How pitiful the weak flight of the last yellow butterfly 

 of the year, as with tattered and battered wings it vainly 

 seeks for a final sip of sweets! The fallen petals and the 



