exist, save in poetry, country houses, and the most rural
circles; even the electric fluid was generally relegated to the
provincial press, where it still keeps company harmoniously with
caloric, the devouring element, nature's abhorrence of a vacuum, and
many other like philosophical fossils: while lightning itself, shorn of
its former glories, could no longer wage impious war against cathedral
towers, but was compelled to restrict itself to blasting a solitary
rider now and again in the open fields, or drilling more holes in the
already crumbling summit of Mount Ararat. Yet it will be a thousand
years more, in all probability, before the last thunderbolt ceases to be
shown as a curiosity here and there to marvelling visitors, and takes
its proper place in some village museum as a belemnite, a meteoric
stone, or a polished axe-head of our neolithic ancestors. Even then, no
doubt, the original bolt will still survive as a recognised property in
the stock-in-trade of every well-equipped poet.

HONEY-DEW

Place, the garden. Time, summer. Dramatis personae, a couple of small
brown garden-ants, and a lazy clustering colony of wee green
'plant-lice,' or 'blight,' or aphides. The exact scene is usually on the
young and succulent branches of a luxuriant rose-bush, into whose soft
shoots the aphides have deeply buried their long trunk-like snouts, in
search of the sap off which they live so contentedly through their brief
lifetime. To them, enter the two small brown ants, their lawful
possessors; for ants, too, though absolutely unrecognised by English law
('de minimis non curat lex,' says the legal aphorism), are nevertheless
in their own commonwealth duly seised of many and various goods and
chattels; and these same aphides, as everybody has heard, stand to them
in pretty much the same position as cows stand to human herdsmen. Throw
in for sole spectator a loitering naturalist, and you get the entire
_mise-en-scene_ of a quaint little drama that works itself out a dozen
times among the wilted rose-trees beneath the latticed cottage windows
every summer morning.

It is a delightful sight to watch the two little lilliputian proprietors
approaching and milking these their wee green motionless cattle. First
of all, the ants quickly scent their way with protruded antennae (for
they are as good as blind, poor things!) up the prickly stem of the
rose-bush, guided, no doubt, by the faint perfume exhaled from the
nectar abo