Idle Days. T41 
yards through the bushes. Never was any thorough- 
fare in a great city fuller of busy hurrying people 
than one of these roads. Sitting beside one, just 
where it wound over the soft yellow sand, I grew 
tired of watching the endless procession of little 
toilers, each one carrying a leaf in his jaws; and 
very soon there came into my ear a whisper from 
somehody— 
Who finds some mischief still 
For idle hands to do. 
It is always pleasant to have even a hypothetical 
somebody on whom to shuffle the responsibility of 
our evil actions. Warning my conscience that I am 
only going to try a scientific experiment, one not 
nearly so cruel as many in which the pious Spallan- 
zani took great delight, I scoop a deep pit in the 
sand ; and the ants, keeping on their way with their 
usual blind, stupid sagacity, tumble pell-mell over 
each other into it. On, on they come, in scores and 
in hundreds, like an endless flock of sheep jumping 
down a pit into which the crazy bell-wether has 
led the way: soon the hundreds have swelled to 
thousands, and the yawning gulf begins to fill with 
an inky mass of wriggling, biting, struggling ants. 
Every falling leaf-cutter carries down a few grains 
of treacherous sand with it, making the descent 
easier, and soon the pit is full to overflowing. In 
five minutes more they will all be out again at their 
accustomed labours, just a little sore about the legs, 
perhaps, where they have bitten one another, but no 
worse for their tumble, and all that will remain, of 
