Germany--but we
had the old road to ourselves.

Now and then, while we rested, we watched the laborious ant at his work.
I found nothing new in him--certainly nothing to change my opinion of
him. It seems to me that in the matter of intellect the ant must be a
strangely overrated bird. During many summers, now, I have watched him,
when I ought to have been in better business, and I have not yet come
across a living ant that seemed to have any more sense than a dead one.
I refer to the ordinary ant, of course; I have had no experience of
those wonderful Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies,
hold slaves, and dispute about religion. Those particular ants may be
all that the naturalist paints them, but I am persuaded that the
average ant is a sham. I admit his industry, of course; he is the
hardest-working creature in the world--when anybody is looking--but
his leather-headedness is the point I make against him. He goes out
foraging, he makes a capture, and then what does he do? Go home? No--he
goes anywhere but home. He doesn't know where home is. His home may be
only three feet away--no matter, he can't find it. He makes his capture,
as I have said; it is generally something which can be of no sort of
use to himself or anybody else; it is usually seven times bigger than
it ought to be; he hunts out the awkwardest place to take hold of it;
he lifts it bodily up in the air by main force, and starts; not toward
home, but in the opposite direction; not calmly and wisely, but with a
frantic haste which is wasteful of his strength; he fetches up against
a pebble, and instead of going around it, he climbs over it backward
dragging his booty after him, tumbles down on the other side, jumps up
in a passion, kicks the dust off his clothes, moistens his hands, grabs
his property viciously, yanks it this way, then that, shoves it ahead
of him a moment, turns tail and lugs it after him another moment,
gets madder and madder, then presently hoists it into the air and goes
tearing away in an entirely new direction; comes to a weed; it never
occurs to him to go around it; no, he must climb it; and he does climb
it, dragging his worthless property to the top--which is as bright
a thing to do as it would be for me to carry a sack of flour from
Heidelberg to Paris by way of Strasburg steeple; when he gets up there
he finds that that is not the place; takes a cursory glance at the
scenery and either climbs down again or tu