IDLE DAYS 135 



days. The combatants, equally sprinkled over a 

 wide area, are seen engaged in single combat or in 

 small groups, while others, non-fighters, run 

 briskly about removing the dead and disabled 

 warriors from the field of battle. 



Perhaps some reader, who has made the ac- 

 quaintance of nature in a London square, will 

 smile at my wonderful ant story. Well, I have 

 smiled too, and cried a little, perhaps, when, wit- 

 nessing one of these "decisive battles of the 

 world, ' ' I have thought that the stable civilization 

 of the CEcodoma ants will probably continue to 

 flourish on the earth when our feverish dream of 

 progress has ceased to vex it. Does that notion 

 seem very fantastical ? Might not such a thought 

 have crossed the mind of some priestly Peruvian, 

 idly watching the labors of a colony of leaf -cutters 

 a thousand years ago, let us say, before the 

 canker had entered into his system to make it, 

 long ere the Spaniard came, ripe for death? His- 

 tory preserves one brief fragment which goes to 

 show that the Incas themselves were not alto- 

 gether enslaved by the sublime traditions they 

 taught the vulgar; that they also possessed, like 

 philosophic moderns, some conception of that im- 

 placable power of nature which orders all things, 

 and is above Viracocha and Pachacamac and the 

 majestic gods that rode the whirlwind and tem- 

 pest, and had their thrones on the everlasting 

 peaks of the Andes. Five or six centuries have 

 probably made little change in the economy of the 



