liver a
wound twice as deep and deadly as the ordinary wasp. She was, in
short, a queen-wasp; a queen of the future, if Fate willed; a queen as
yet without a kingdom, a sovereign uncrowned, but of regal proportions
and queenly aspect, for all that; for in the insect world royalties are
fashioned upon a super-standard that marks them off from the common
herd.

The spider hesitated. She knew the danger of the stripes of
yellow--the yellow flag, so to speak. The fear of it is upon every
insect that lives. At the same time, the queen was undoubtedly yet
numb.

Antagonists decide in the insect world like a flash of light, and quick
as thought they act. The spider attacked now so quickly that she
seemed to have vanished, and she met--jaws. Back she shot, circled,
shot in again, and she met--sting!

It was never clear whether that sting went home. The spider did. She
fell--fell plump to the floor, only not breaking what spiders have in
place of a neck because of the fact that, being a spider, she never
moved anywhere, not even upon a spring, without anchoring a line of web
down first. Therefore, an inch from the ground, she fetched up with a
jerk upon the line that she had anchored up on the joist, spun round,
let herself drop the rest of the way, and ran into the crack between
the boards of the floor. Goodness knows if she lived.

The wasp, with that extremely droll, lugubrious look on her long,
mask-like face which makes the faces of insects so funny and uncanny,
like pantomime masks, sat down as if nothing had happened, apparently
to scheme out the best way to possess herself of a kingdom and become a
queen in fact as well as in name. Really, she was cleaning
herself--combing her antennae with her forelegs, provided with bristle
hairs for the purpose, scraping and polishing her wings, as if they did
not already shine like mother-o'-pearl, and washing her quaint face.

She was still rather groggy from the effects of her long sleep and the
cold endured--it is a wonder how she had stood the latter at all--and
when, with a subdued inward sort of hum, she finally launched herself
in flight, she nearly fell to the ground before righting herself and
flying in a zigzag heavily across the lawn.

A cock-chaffinch up in the limes saw her, and condescending at last to
break his song, described a flashing streak of wine-red breast and
white wing-bars in the sun. He appeared to recognize her sinister
yellow shield in