Grasshoppers, Crickets, and Locusts. 239 



And failing fact, why not let fancy suggest an explanation ? 

 The ants find life dull, the ceaseless round of silent and 

 prosaic drudgery intolerable. So they pay with board and 

 lodging the minnesingers of the meadows, the troubadours 

 of the stubble, to live with them and cheer the toilers of their 

 austere republic with music. Thus too do we see men of 

 monotonous labour sitting at their work with singing-birds 

 hanging overhead. In the old sailing-ship days the fiddler 

 fiddled to the crew when at work. Music always lightens 

 labour of a mechanical kind. What new life the band puts 

 into the legs of marching soldiers ! In every country in the 

 world you will find the coolies, the porters, and those who 

 perform tedious and unvarying work, invariably chanting as 

 they toil. Overseers of all kinds encourage it. The fact is 

 as old as the hills as ant-hills. And so too (there is no harm 

 in such imaginings) the industrious emmet may perhaps, after 

 all, not be such a fanatic in the unwisdom of perpetual slaving 

 as has been thought. 



But if my fancy be allowable, that the ants (do they not 

 keep wood-lice as housemaids ?) entertain musicians for the 

 brightening of their daily lives, the poet is at fault, and the 

 cricket's scraping "relieves the o'erlaboured bulk" and 

 teaches a " seasonable smile." All of which would be very 

 engaging for I consider the ceaseless moiling of ants 

 abominable. 



Let this be as it may, the fact remains that grasshopper- 

 folk and ants do live together, and so the bottom falls 

 delightfully out of the fable which makes the one intolerant 

 of the other's idle habits. The grasshopper, the singer of 

 an idle hour, finds his friends in the appreciative citizens of 

 the little hills, and the pismire is no longer an unsympathetic 

 little prig. 



Curious, too, is the notion that grasshoppers are short- 

 lived : is it from these creatures that the phrase " a short 

 life and a merry one " is taken ? 



