Wherefore did our queen, after making quite sure that the sack-like atom with a mouth, hanging upside-down in the cell, and wriggling like anything to show its hunger, was alive, sound, and quite all there, quit home in a hurry, and with a loud buzz, in search of rations.  But there was a change in her manner from that adopted when looking for food for herself, and for good reason. Then her object had been honey; now it was—­scalps!

From force of habit, more perhaps than from force of reasoning, she flew to the rose-trees, and there fixed in her shear jaws not more than two of the helpless, fool, unarmed, soft, juicy green-fly, which are really no more, if one may so put it, than living, infinitesimal “white” grapes.  That she was challenged by a sentry ant—­about as big to her as a bulldog to us—­that the sentry gave the alarm, that the guard turned out from one of the ants’ “cowsheds” over some of the green-fly, and that she went away in a hurry, with half-a-dozen furious ants on their hindlegs, trying to get hold of her retiring feet with their jaws, was a matter treated by her with insolent unconcern.

She had got her scalps, and winging home in a hurry to her baby, fed it upon green-fly.  The baby did not feed nicely, and the picture of the glistening, corsleted devil queen-mother, with her lugubrious, mask-like face, and the wriggling, hanging sack babe, and the luckless, fool, helpless green-fly between them, was not a pretty one.  Here maternity was not a Sunday-sermon subject, yet it was maternity all the same.

By this time other eggs in other cells were splitting, and giving out legless grub horrors, as seeds that give forth plants, each wriggling mummy taking care to hook itself up to its shell by the tail at once, lest it perish.  And the queen’s work from that moment really began.  Till then she had only tinkered at it, apparently.  Now she got going “real some,” and—­well, all the insect world outside knew it.  The terror of the yellow flag spread.

Upon an hour she would appear, dropping, hawk-like and terrible, out of the sun-glare, and neatly pick up a soft and juicy caterpillar from a cabbage-stalk.  Upon another hour she would be discovered, feet tucked up and wary, darting, like an iridescent gleam, around the angry ants, among the green-fly on the rose-bushes.  The drowsy hum of the kettle on the kitchen fire, and the steady, low hum of the house-fly dance in the middle of the room, would be answered in the long, hot afternoons by her wicked warning drone as she came sailing in at the open window, like the insolent pirate that she was, to go out again a minute later with a helpless fly between her jaws.  The first heat of the sun, drinking up the dew, would discover her sailing forth to war; his full, sizzling rays would reveal her waging violent warfare with the bluebottle flies over some carcass; into his amber light of the noon her yellow flag would suddenly rise from out