after their marriage flight,
have a disagreeable habit of flying in at the open doors and windows at
lunch time, settling upon the table like the Harpies in the AEneid, and
then quietly shuffling off their wings one at a time, by holding them
down against the table-cloth with one leg, and running away vigorously
with the five others. As soon as they have thus disembarrassed
themselves of their superfluous members, they proceed to run about over
the lunch as if the house belonged to them, and to make a series of
experiments upon the edible qualities of the different dishes. One
doesn't so much mind their philosophical inquiries into the nature of
the bread or even the meat; but when they come to drowning themselves by
dozens, in the pursuit of knowledge, in the soup and sherry, one feels
bound to protest energetically against the spirit of martyrdom by which
they are too profoundly animated. That is one of the slight drawbacks of
the realms of perpetual summer; in the poets you see only one side of
the picture--the palms, the orchids, the humming-birds, the great
trailing lianas: in practical life you see the reverse side--the
thermometer at 98 deg., the tepid drinking-water, the prickly heat, the
perpetual languor, the endless shoals of aggressive insects. A lady of
my acquaintance, indeed, made a valuable entomological collection in her
own dining-room, by the simple process of consigning to pill-boxes all
the moths and flies and beetles that settled upon the mangoes and
star-apples in the course of dessert.

Another objectionable habit of the tropical ants, viewed practically,
is their total disregard of vested interests in the case of house
property. Like Mr. George and his communistic friends, they disbelieve
entirely in the principle of private rights in real estate. They will
eat their way through the beams of your house till there is only a
slender core of solid wood left to support the entire burden. I have
taken down a rafter in my own house in Jamaica, originally 18 inches
thick each way, with a sound circular centre of no more than 6 inches in
diameter, upon which all the weight necessarily fell. With the material
extracted from the wooden beams they proceed to add insult to injury by
building long covered galleries right across the ceiling of your
drawing-room. As may be easily imagined, these galleries do not tend to
improve the appearance of the ceiling; and it becomes necessary to form
a Liberty and Prop