Part 13

"Clever! Gracious!" says Mary. "Do you know Professor Forbes? Is he really--does he always tell the--"

I interrupt. I am sensitive about such questions. I answer rather sharply. "Yes, I do know him; and yes, he always tells the truth. Don't interrupt any more, please, for there is still more of the story." Mary is silent.

"Well, the aphids stay on the smart-weed roots until the corn is planted, which is in about ten days, and the kernels begin to germinate and to send down the tender juice-filled roots. And then the little brown ants take the aphids, now getting larger and stronger, of course, but still too helpless or stupid to do much for themselves except to suck sap, and carry them from the smart-weed roots to the corn-roots--What's that, Mary?"

But Mary had said nothing; just drawn in her breath with a little sound. Still I think it best to remind her that I do know Professor Forbes and that he really does always tell the truth. In fact, I quote to Mary this honest professor's exact words about this transfer of the aphids from the weed-roots to the corn-roots. This is what he writes in his intensely interesting account of the whole life of these little insects: "In many cases in the field, we have found the young root aphis on sprouting weeds (especially pigeon-grass) which have been sought out by the ants before the leaves had shown above the ground; and, similarly, when the field is planted to corn, these ardent explorers will frequently discover the sprouting kernel in the earth, and mine along the starting stem and place the plant aphids upon it."

"And the little brown ants do all this so as to get honey-dew from the aphids?" asks Mary.

"Exactly," I reply. "The ants take such good care of the aphids not because they pity their helplessness or just want to be good, but because they know, by some instinct or reason, that these are the insects that, when they grow up, make honey-dew, which is the kind of food that ants seem to like better than any other. Indeed not only the little brown ants alone take care of the corn-root aphids to get honey-dew, but at least six other kinds of ants that live in the Illinois corn-fields do it. But the little brown ants are the most abundant and seem to give the aphids the best care."

"It is exactly like keeping cows, isn't it," says Mary. "But they don't have to milk them."

"Well," I reply, "I don't know what you would call it, but some other ants that take care of some other kinds of honey-dew insects seem to have to carry on a sort of milking performance to make them pour out their sweet liquid. The ants have to pat or rub them with their hairy little feelers; sort of tickle them to get them to squeeze out a little drop of honey-dew. The truth is, Mary, if I should tell you the really amazing things that ants do, you simply wouldn't believe me at all. But the next time we go out, I'll take you to see for yourself an ant community right on the campus that does some remarkable things. I'd much rather have you see the things yourself than tell you about them."

"I'd rather, too," says Mary, which isn't exactly the nicest thing she could say, but I know what she means. It's that seeing is better than being told by anybody.

And then the up-and-down "ding, dang, dong, ding," of the clock-bells begins its little song in four verses that means the end of an hour. And then come the six slow deep calls of the biggest bell that tell what hour it is. It is the hour for us to go home.

AN HOUR OF LIVING; OR, THE DANCE OF DEATH

"But why didn't he go back if he liked France so much better; and if he had plenty of money?" asked Mary.

"Ah, well, even having plenty of money doesn't always make it possible to do just what we prefer," I say. "The truth is,--if it is the truth, and not just malicious gossip,--it was exactly because he had plenty of money that he couldn't go back. He is supposed to have got that money in some wrong way. Anyway, he didn't seem to care to go back to la belle France, but preferred to live solitarily here, and to plant lines of trees and lay out little lakes and build rockwork towers and make terraces and driveways and paths, all in very formal lines, as in the parks at Versailles and St. Cloud, which were the playgrounds of French kings and the pride of all France."

Mary and I were seated on a curious little cement-and-stone imitation tower-ruin that stuck up out of Frenchman's Pond, which is near the campus, and is a good place for seeing things and getting away from the classroom bells. A long row of scraggly Lombardy poplars stretches away from the pond along an old terraced roadway with a cave opening on it. Around two sides of the little lake is a rockwork wall, and across one end, where the pond narrows, is a picturesque stone bridge of single span. Everything is neglected, and altogether Frenchman's Pond and its surroundings are a good imitation of something old and foreign in this glaringly new and extremely Californian bit of the world. It is a favorite place for us to come when I want to tell Mary stories of the castles on the Rhine. We get a proper atmosphere.

It was so sunny and warm this morning that we had given up chatting and were simply sitting or sprawling as comfortably as we could on the irregular top of our Aussichtsthurm. A few flying dragons, some in bronze-red mail, some in greenish blue, were wheeling about over the pond, and a meadow-lark kept up a most cheerful singing in the pasture nearby. It was really just the sort of day and place and feeling that Mary and I like best. We knew we ought, as persevering Nature students, to get down and poke around in the weeds and ooze of the edges of the pond so as to see things. But we didn't want to do it, and so we didn't. That is one perfectly beautiful thing about the way Mary and I study Nature. We don't when we don't want to.

But if we didn't climb down to the live things this day at Frenchman's Pond, they came up to us. One of the flying dragons actually swooped so close to our heads that we could hear its shining brittle wings crackle, and only a few minutes after, a curious delicate little creature with four gauzy wings, a pair of projecting eyes with a fixed stare, and three long hair-like tails on its body, lit on Mary's hand and walked slowly and rather totteringly up her bare wrist and fore arm. Then without any fluttering or struggling, it slowly fell over on one side and lay quite still. It was dead!

This rather took our breath away. We are only too well accustomed, unfortunately, to seeing death come to our little companions; they do not live long, at best, and then so many of them get killed and eaten. But they usually make some protest when Death approaches. They do not surrender their brief joy of living in such utterly unresisting way as this little creature did. But when I had got my spectacles properly adjusted, I saw what it was that had died so quietly and suddenly. The little gauzy-winged creature was a May-fly, or ephemera, and life with the May-flies is such a truly ephemeral thing, and death comes regularly so soon and so swiftly, and without any apparent illness or injury intervening between health and dissolution, that we naturalists have ceased to wonder at it. Although this is not because we understand it at all. Far from it. Indeed the death of any creature, except from obvious accident or wasting illness, is one of the mysteries of life. Which sounds rather Irish, but is just what I mean.

But Mary was looking thoughtfully at this dead little May-fly in her hand. It was so soft and delicate of body, had such frail and filmy wings, that it seemed that it must have been very ill-fitted to cope with the hard conditions of insect living, to escape the numerous insect-feeding creatures and to find food and shelter for itself, to be successful, in a word, in the "struggle for existence"! And in a way, this is quite true. But, in another way, it is not true. For the May-flies, in their flying stage, make up for their frailness and feebleness, their inability to feed--they have really no mouth-parts and do not eat at all in their few hours or days of flying life--by existing in enormous numbers, and millions may be killed, or may die from very feebleness, and yet there are enough left to lay the eggs necessary for a new generation, and that is success in life for them. Nothing else is necessary; their whole aim and achievement in life seems to be to lay eggs and start a new generation of May-flies.

I settled back into a still more comfortable position and said: "Did I ever tell you, Mary, of the May-flies' dance of death I saw in Lucerne once, not far from the old bridge across the Reuss with its famous pictures of our own dance of death? Well, then, we'll just about have time before the tower-clock calls us home. Do you want to hear about it?"

"Yes, please," said Mary.

"Well, I had been studying in a great university in an old German town all the spring and early summer and had come to Switzerland for my vacation. You know there are splendid mountains there--"

"The Alps," interrupted Mary. "The highest is Mt. Blanc, 15,730 feet above the sea."

How Mary does know her geography!

"And beautiful lakes," I continue. "And the roads are good for tramping, and the hotels cheap. Anyway, the ones the students go to. I had come to Lucerne from Zurich--"

"Noted for its silks and university where women can go," Mary broke in again.

Bless me, what's the use of going to Europe anyway, if you learn everything about everywhere in the grades?

"And had gone straight to the Muehlenbruecke," I go on,--"that's the old bridge all covered with a roof that crosses the Reuss only a few rods from where it flows out of the lake; the lake of Lucerne, you know."

"Of course," said Mary.