through and, when wearied and fretted with the
responsibilities of independent existence, I know I shall often recall
and envy my grub in his palatial parasitic home. Outside came a rather
hard, brown protective sheath; then the main body of the gall, of firm
and dense tissue; and finally, at the heart, like the Queen's chamber
in Cheops, the irregular little dwelling-place of the grub. This was
not empty and barren; but the blackness and silence of this vegetable
chamber, this architecture fashioned by the strangest of builders for
the most remarkable of tenants, was filled with a nap of long,
crystalline hairs or threads like the spun-glass candy in our
Christmas sweetshops--white at the base and shading from pale salmon
to the deepest of pinks. This exquisite tapestry, whose beauties were
normally 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, although 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 prospect of change or of adventure than an
average toadstool.

* * * * *

Thus I sat for a long time, lulled by similitudes of northern plants
and bees and birds, and then gently shifted southward a few hundred
miles, the transition being smooth and unabrupt. With equal gentleness
the dead calm stirred slightly and exhaled the merest ghost of a
breeze; it seemed as if the air was hardly in motion, but only
restless: the wings of the bees and the flycatcher might well have
caused it. But, judged by the sequence of events, it was the almost
imperceptibl