Attas. Yet they offered problems for years of study. The glade was a
little world in itself, with visitors and tenants, comedy and tragedy,
sounds and silences. It was an ant-made glade, with all new growths
either choked by upflung, earthen hillocks, or leaves bitten off as
soon as they appeared. The casual visitors were the most conspicuous,
an occasional trogon swooping across--a glowing, feathered comet of
emerald, azurite and gold; or, slowly drifting in and out among the
vines and coming to rest with waving wings, a yellow and red spotted
Ithomiid,--or was it a Heliconiid or a Danaiid?--with such bewildering
models and marvelous mimics it was impossible to tell without capture
and close examination. Giant, purple tarantula-hawks hummed past,
scanning the leaves for their prey.

Another class of glade haunters were those who came strictly on
business,--plasterers and sculptors, who found wet clay ready to their
needs. Great golden and rufous bees blundered down and gouged out
bucketsful of mud; while slender-bodied, dainty, ebony wasps, after
much fastidious picking of place, would detach a tiny bit of the
whitest clay, place it in their snuff-box holder, clean their feet and
antennae, run their rapier in and out and delicately take to wing.

Little black trigonid bees had their special quarry, a small deep
valley in the midst of a waste of interlacing Bad Lands, on the side
of a precipitous butte. Here they picked and shoveled to their hearts'
content, plastering their thighs until their wings would hardly lift
them. They braced their feet, whirred, lifted unevenly, and sank back
with a jar. Then turning, they bit off a piece of ballast, and heaving
it over the precipice, swung off on an even keel.

Close examination of some of the craters and volcanic-like cones
revealed many species of ants, beetles and roaches searching for bits
of food--the scavengers of this small world. But the most interesting
were the actual parasites, flies of many colors and sizes, humming
past like little planes and zeppelins over this hidden city, ready to
drop a bomb in the form of an egg deposited on the refuse heaps or on
the ants themselves. The explosion might come slowly, but it would be
none the less deadly. Once I detected a hint of the complexity of the
glade life--beautiful metallic green flies walking swiftly about on
long legs, searching nervously, whose eggs would be deposited near
those of other flies, their larvae to