again a minute later
with a helpless fly between her jaws. The first heat of the sun,
drinking up the dew, would discover her sailing forth to war; his full,
sizzling rays would reveal her waging violent warfare with the
bluebottle flies over some carcass; into his amber light of the noon
her yellow flag would suddenly rise from out the cool shade of the
larder, where she had been carving meat, and "when the sun mended his
twisted copper nets," he would flash in bronze from her glistening
cuirass as she droned by high over some wriggling grub, caterpillar, or
palsied fly fast locked in her jaws--and all for her young, all for her
couple of dozen legless horrors, hanging by their tails, each in its
narrow cell, in darkness and in dead silence, in the embryo city under
the secret earth.

Time was when these same grubs grew so fat and big that they no longer
hung, but became fast wedged in their dormitories; time when the queen
had to set to and extend downwards the wall of each cell lest the
growing inmates bulge over, and, obsessed with their ravening hunger,
incontinently eat each other; and time at last when, one after the
other, each grub, having grown out of more than one suit of clothes and
donned new ones, cast its skin for the last time, refused all further
food, spun a cocoon of silk with a dome-shaped silken floor to each
cell, and for a period retired from the prying eyes of the world, even
of its own mother, into the sacred sanctuary of the chrysalis state.
Then the queen's labor lightened a little for a period, so that you
could again see her at spare moments sucking nectar from the flowers
for herself, robbing the jam-dish, or lapping up the "honey-dew" of the
green-fly.

Finally came _the_ day. It dawned all right, and there was nothing
about it to show that it was going to be different from any other fine
day; yet, as soon as the wasp woke up, she knew that, for her, it was
the day of Fate.

A very cursory inspection of the budding city showed at once that
during the night things had been happening and changes taking place.
The domed floors of several of the cells were palpitating with life
from within, and there were sounds of the gnawing and tearing of the
silken screens.

The queen became greatly excited, and began to hum and dance a little
step-dance to herself, all alone in the darkness among the cells, as
she saw her triumph evolving before her eyes. And, almost as if the
hum had called it,