there rushed at her, out of the blackness across the
comb, a--a thing.

She knew by instinct that it was an enemy. Indeed, it could not well
be anything else, but it fought like a black devil.

It was, in point of fact, a mole-cricket, a creature just like its
namesake, if an insect can be said to resemble an animal, only that its
jaws were like unto the jaws of a lobster. It was a fearsome
apparition, and very much larger even than the queen. The good God
alone knoweth why it had chosen that moment and place to run apparently
amok.

But, if the mole-cricket ran amok, the queen-wasp went berserk. It was
a thing unthinkable that in that moment of triumph she, and the
awakening city with her, should be cut off--unthinkable and impossible,
unthinkable and maddening. Therefore she fought as few wasps have
probably fought before or since, and they are pretty expert exponents,
and scarcely backward ones, of warfare.

The battle that followed was awful.

Almost at the start the two insects, grappling, fell headlong to the
excavation the queen had made below the city, and there, rolling over
and over, continued the struggle in the dark among the refuse, the
queen eternally feeling with her poison-dagger for a space to drive
home her death-blow between the other's smooth, shining armor-plates;
the cricket eternally endeavoring to behead the queen between its awful
jaws.

It was a fight to the death, as most insect duels are, and it could not
last long. It was too tense, too fiendish, too shockingly wicked for
that.

Suddenly the queen's body shot out like a spring. The opening she had
been feeling for had appeared, and she had driven her death-blow home.
At the same instant, with a supreme effort, she bent double and shot
herself free, the last convulsive, shearing crush of her foe's laws
clashing to so close above her head that they actually caught in their
death-grip, and held, till she pulled them out by the roots, two
bristles of her neck.

And then--well, then the queen hurried back up to her city, just in
time to help out of its cell the first of her children--and citizens at
last--the first limp, clambering, damp, newly painted, freshly bedecked
young worker-wasp, perfect from feeler to sting, from wing to claw.

Quickly they broke out now from the cocoons, and the queen bustled from
one to the other, assisting, cleaning, encouraging; for it is a tricky
job for an insect to come out of its chrysalis-cas