ight merrily. They build great towns; they rob far and wide; they
never quarrel with each other: they must have some one to teach
them, to lead them--they must have a king. And so he gets the fancy
of a Wasp-King; as the western Irish still believe in the Master
Otter; as the Red Men believe in the King of the Buffaloes, and find
the bones of his ancestors in the Mammoth remains of Big-bone Lick;
as the Philistines of Ekron--to quote a notorious instance--actually
worshipped Baal-zebub, lord of the flies.

If they have a king, he must be inside that tree, of course. If he,
the savage, were a king, he would not work for his bread, but sit at
home and make others feed him; and so, no doubt, does the wasp-king.

And when he goes home he will brood over this wonderful discovery of
the wasp-king; till, like a child, he can think of nothing else. He
will go to the tree, and watch for him to come out. The wasps will
get accustomed to his motionless figure, and leave him unhurt; till
the new fancy will rise in his mind that he is a favourite of this
wasp-king: and at last he will find himself grovelling before the
tree, saying--"Oh great wasp-king, pity me, and tell your children
not to sting me, and I will bring you honey, and fruit, and flowers
to eat, and I will flatter you, and worship you, and you shall be my
king."

And then he would gradually boast of his discovery; of the new
mysterious bond between him and the wasp-king; and his tribe would
believe him, and fear him; and fear him still more when he began to
say, as he surely would, not merely--"I can ask the wasp-king, and
he will tell his children not to sting you:" but--"I can ask the
wasp-king, and he will send his children, and sting you all to
death." Vanity and ambition will have prompted the threat: but it
will not be altogether a lie. The man will more than half believe
his own words; he will quite believe them when he has repeated them
a dozen times.

And so he will become a great man, and a king, under the protection
of the king of the wasps; and he will become, and it may be his
children after him, priest of the wasp-king, who will be their
fetish, and the fetish of their tribe.

And they will prosper, under the protection of the wasp-king. The
wasp will become their moral ideal, whose virtues they must copy.
The new chief will preach to them wild eloquent words. They must
sting like wasps, revenge like wasps, hold altogether like wasps,
b