A JUNGLE CLEARING 47 
Christmas sweetshops—white at the base and 
shading from pale salmon to the deepest of pinks. 
This exquisite tapestry, whose beauties were nor- 
mally forever hidden as well from the blind grub 
as from the outside world, was the ambrosia all 
unwittingly provided by the antagonism of the 
plant; the nutrition of resentment, the food of 
defiance; and day by day the grub gradually ate 
his way from one end to the other of his suite, 
laying a normal, healthful physical foundation 
for his future aerial activities. 
The natural history of galls is full of romance 
and strange unrealities, but to-day it meant to 
me only a renewed instance of an opportunity 
seized and made the most of; the success of the 
indirect, the unreasonable—the long chance 
which so few of us humans are willing to take, al- 
though the reward is a perpetual enthusiasm for 
the happening of the moment, and the honest 
gambler’s joy for the future. How much more 
desirable to acquire merit as a footless grub in 
the heart of a home, erected and precariously 
nourished by a worthy opponent, with a future 
of unnumbered possibilities, than to be a queen- 
mother in nest or hive—cared-for, fed, and 
cleansed by a host of slaves, but with less pros- 
