quence;
and the other was a carnivorous beetle, in black, purple-shot armor,
and armed with jaws toothed like lobsters' claws. The queen took some
nasty scars from those same jaws before she got home with the poisoned
point, a clean thrust 'twist breastplate and armlet, and the invader
doubled up on the spot where he was, and had to be dragged out in the
morning--not the dawning, for the sun had well stoked up before our
wasp would have anything to do with him.

[Illustration: "A shrew-mouse, thirsting for blood, but who got poison
instead"]

She found the day already in full swing when she rose, buzzing, from
her front-gate, late--for wasps hate early morning chill, like Red
Indians--and, circling once, swung straight away. She jumped into full
hustle right off, you see. She did not merely work; she superworked.
Forced to short hours by her constitution, she had to make up for it in
the time she got, and she did. She allowed nothing to stop her. If
anything tried to, she mostly stopped it, for there was no compromise
about this nation-builder; she reached her goal every time.

It was on this journey that a spotted fly-catcher, sitting on a
gatepost, made a Euclid figure at her in midair as she passed. She had
not power to fight the bird's beak, and her poison-dagger was useless
here; nor do fly-catchers often miss. This, however, was an occasion
when one of them did--by an eighth of an inch--and only some
electric-spark-like dodging on the part of the insect in the air made
even that one miss possible. It was so quick, you could not see what
happened.

That day the cross of cells in this budding city was developed further,
and a low wall built round each cell. Moreover, more cells were built,
always taking the cross as the center of all things--six-sided cells,
with a low, incomplete wall, or, rather, parapet, partitioning each
off, to the number of about twenty-four cells in all. Each cell was
closed, of course, at the top, the top being its floor, and open at the
bottom, the bottom being, if I may so put it, the top; for, as has
already been said, wasp cities are built upside-down, and everybody
walks and hangs on his head, being so fitted for the purpose. If you
don't hang, you tumble straight down into the scooped-out cavity below;
but nobody ever does that till he dies, for that cavity is at once the
cemetery and the refuse-heap and the dust-bin of the city, a haunt of
tiny ghouls--beetle, spider,