the woods, no one suspects who hurries unobservant along
the beaten tracks. You must bend aside the branches of the
underbrush, or lean down and peep between the blackberry briars
through the tall grasses and across the thick moss. Under the
shaded leaves of the plants, in holes in the ground and
tree-trunks, in the decaying bark of stumps, in the curl and
twist of the roots that coil on the ground like serpents, there
is an active, multiform life by day and by night, full of joys
and dangers, struggles and sorrows and pleasures.

Maya divined only a little of this as she flew low between the
dark-brown trunks under the leafy roof of green. She followed a
narrow trail in the grass, which made a clear path through
thicket and clearing. Now and then the sun seemed to disappear
behind clouds, so deep was the shade under the high foliage and
in the close shrubbery; but soon she was flying again through a
bright shimmer of gold and green above the broad-leaved
miniature forests of bracken and blackberry.

After a long stretch the woods opened their columned and
over-arched portals; before Maya's eyes lay a wide field of
grain in the golden sunshine. Butterfly-weed flamed on the
grassy borders. She alighted on the branch of a birch-tree at
the edge of the field and gazed upon the sea of gold that spread
out endlessly in the tranquillity of the placid day. It rippled
softly under the shy summer breeze, which blew gently so as not
to disturb the peace of the lovely world.

Under the birch-tree a few small brown butterflies, using the
butterfly-weed for corners, were playing puss-in-the-corner,
a favorite game with butterfly-children. Maya watched them a
while.

"It must be lots of fun," she thought, "and the children in the
hive might be taught to play it, too. The cells would do for
corners.-- But Cassandra, I suppose, wouldn't permit it. She's
so strict."

Ah, now Maya felt sad again. Because she had thought of home.
And she was about to drift off into homesick revery when she
heard someone beside her say:

"Good morning. You're a beast, it seems to me."

Maya turned with a start.

"No," she said, "decidedly not."

There sitting on her leaf was a little polished terra-cotta
half-sphere with seven black dots on its cupola of a back,
a minute black head and bright little eyes. Peeping from under
the dotted dome and supporting it as best they could Maya
detected thin legs fine as threads. In spite of his queer
fi