sibilities of what we were making. It's
only beginning to dawn upon me ... the possible consequences...."

And even then, you know, Mr. Bensington was far from any conception of
the mine that little train would fire.

IV.

That happened early in June. For some weeks Bensington was kept from
revisiting the Experimental Farm by a severe imaginary catarrh, and one
necessary flying visit was made by Redwood. He returned an even more
anxious-looking parent than he had gone. Altogether there were seven
weeks of steady, uninterrupted growth....

And then the Wasps began their career.

It was late in July and nearly a week before the hens escaped from
Hickleybrow that the first of the big wasps was killed. The report of it
appeared in several papers, but I do not know whether the news reached
Mr. Bensington, much less whether he connected it with the general
laxity of method that prevailed in the Experimental Farm.

There can be but little doubt now, that while Mr. Skinner was plying Mr.
Bensington's chicks with Herakleophorbia IV, a number of wasps were just
as industriously--perhaps more industriously--carrying quantities of the
same paste to their early summer broods in the sand-banks beyond the
adjacent pine-woods. And there can be no dispute whatever that these
early broods found just as much growth and benefit in the substance as
Mr. Bensington's hens. It is in the nature of the wasp to attain to
effective maturity before the domestic fowl--and in fact of all the
creatures that were--through the generous carelessness of the
Skinners--partaking of the benefits Mr. Bensington heaped upon his hens,
the wasps were the first to make any sort of figure in the world.

It was a keeper named Godfrey, on the estate of Lieutenant-Colonel
Rupert Hick, near Maidstone, who encountered and had the luck
to kill the first of these monsters of whom history has any
record. He was walking knee high in bracken across an open space in the
beechwoods that diversify Lieutenant-Colonel Hick's park, and he was
carrying his gun--very fortunately for him a double-barrelled gun--over
his shoulder, when he first caught sight of the thing. It was, he says,
coming down against the light, so that he could not see it very
distinctly, and as it came it made a drone "like a motor car." He admits
he was frightened. It was evidently as big or bigger than a barn owl,
and, to his practised eye, its flight and particularly the misty whirl
of its wings