s hunger, was alive, sound, and quite all there,
quit home in a hurry, and with a loud buzz, in search of rations. But
there was a change in her manner from that adopted when looking for
food for herself, and for good reason. _Then_ her object had been
honey; now it was--scalps!

From force of habit, more perhaps than from force of reasoning, she
flew to the rose-trees, and there fixed in her shear jaws not more than
two of the helpless, fool, unarmed, soft, juicy green-fly, which are
really no more, if one may so put it, than living, infinitesimal
"white" grapes. That she was challenged by a sentry ant--about as big
to her as a bulldog to us--that the sentry gave the alarm, that the
guard turned out from one of the ants' "cowsheds" over some of the
green-fly, and that she went away in a hurry, with half-a-dozen furious
ants on their hindlegs, trying to get hold of her retiring feet with
their jaws, was a matter treated by her with insolent unconcern.

She had got her scalps, and winging home in a hurry to her baby, fed it
upon green-fly. The baby did not feed nicely, and the picture of the
glistening, corsleted devil queen-mother, with her lugubrious,
mask-like face, and the wriggling, hanging sack babe, and the luckless,
fool, helpless green-fly between them, was not a pretty one. Here
maternity was not a Sunday-sermon subject, yet it was maternity all the
same.

By this time other eggs in other cells were splitting, and giving out
legless grub horrors, as seeds that give forth plants, each wriggling
mummy taking care to hook itself up to its shell by the tail at once,
lest it perish. And the queen's work from that moment really began.
Till then she had only tinkered at it, apparently. Now she got going
"real some," and--well, all the insect world outside knew it. The
terror of the yellow flag spread.

Upon an hour she would appear, dropping, hawk-like and terrible, out of
the sun-glare, and neatly pick up a soft and juicy caterpillar from a
cabbage-stalk. Upon another hour she would be discovered, feet tucked
up and wary, darting, like an iridescent gleam, around the angry ants,
among the green-fly on the rose-bushes. The drowsy hum of the kettle
on the kitchen fire, and the steady, low hum of the house-fly dance in
the middle of the room, would be answered in the long, hot afternoons
by her wicked warning drone as she came sailing in at the open window,
like the insolent pirate that she was, to go out