my beautiful Wasp has pounced upon the amorous Cicada, and
pierced and paralyzed like the spider before him, he is being
borne to a grave in that grassy bank. There, in the Wasp's
burrow, buried alive though with a semblance of death, he shall
feed the maw of a hungry worm.

"It is mother love!" exclaimed the unseen Brownie Queen, sadly I
thought and tenderly. "But mother love seems cruel sometimes; and
it alone has not taught the Wasp to spare the mating love of its
fellow insects."

This is not all that I saw, but this is such as I saw on that
memorable occasion. My experience started a train of meditation
that was the reverse of agreeable. But what could I say? I had
been observing the facts of Nature, nothing more nor less. I
looked away over the landscape again and my feelings were not
what they were before. Underneath the surface of all this beauty
and summer repose I seemed to feel the beating of a fevered
pulse. Yes, the Doctor of the Gentiles spake truly: "The whole
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain."[G] Yes, I was
beginning to read between the lines! Verily, I perceived that the
insect world in the matter of anxiety, struggles and sufferings,
in passions of love, hate and covetousness, is after all in some
sort a miniature of our own world of human beings.

I do not know how long I sat pondering these things, but I was
presently conscious that my Brownie friends had returned.

"You have changed your opinion about some of the inferior
creatures, have you not?" began Queen Fancy. "I know that it must
be so. And now it remains for you to change your opinion about
us. You think we are perfectly happy, never touched by such
conflicts and cares as mortals and insects have. No! it is with
us as it is with you and all the rest. One idea runs through all
Nature and all her creatures high and low. All alike, from gnats
and fairies to mastodons and men, have friends and foes, perils
and pleasures, pains and joys, loves and hates, bitter
disappointments and proud attainments; watchings, cares, strifes,
battles, defeats, heart desolations, sickness, oppressions,
despoilment, death--all these and the reverse of all these happen
to us all."

"It is true!" I answered, "I see now that it is quite true. The
fact that creatures are small and unknown to us, and outside our
ordinary region of feel