The daily morning journal and courier., 1897-08-27

pupae, and brought up the rear. After a hurried march of ten miles, or say
 thirty feet, the advance guard came suddenly upon the walls of Troy
 whose people were pursuing their peace
 ful industries, some of them carrying
 hodfuls of clay from their caverns, and others bringing in armfuls Of food to be consumed by the infant population. q
 believe the heretical scientists have de-
 stroyed the force of Solomon's sage advice to the slothful to regard the saw ing powers of the ant by proving that
 the creature hihernates in winter and
 stores no victuals.) The working Tro- jans were very active brushing past each other with no sort of greeting dis cernible by human eyes or ears, and
 utterly disregardful of the heat of the
 day. the news of the Victorian Jubilee,
 or the pulling of the wheat market.
 The Greeks, on the other hand, were attending as strictly to their marching as though they had closely to mind, the
 beats of a Sousa band
 When some of the outside workers of the Trojan army were approached by the leaders of the Grecian horde there was cessation of labor. The chunks of clay were dropped, the wild oaten grains abandoned, and there was a quiet, unostentations advance upon the invaders. There was a twirling of an- tennae, yawning of niundibles, and Trojan met Greek in a hand-to- hand struggle to the death. The first fencing
 with the antennae and the first clinch or the pincer-llke jaws upon neck, back or leg were as combatively coloress as any thing in the way of mortal strug- gle could be. It was illustrative of the
 matter -of-factness of real tragedy as contrasted with the tragedy of romance and ot drama. No strutting, bombastic
 hero pointed his sword to high heaven and called upon his deity or yelled So
 l wait the foe!'' It was just as 1t is in
 real war anywhere outside of the prize
 ring. You see your enemy and you
 quietly make for him to do him bodily injury, or else you run away.
 But there was no running away of
 these doughty warriors. As the Grecian
 army came on the Trojans, one by one
 knocked off work and went to fighting.
 The Trojans had formidable host to
 meet, but they rocked not of that, and
 they mustered their soldiers in masses
 from their black caverns and came on in fnnumerable and very struggling companies. The combat deepened There were now possibly 2000 or 5000 comba- tants actually engaged, and all in space that you could have covered with a pocket handkerchief There was fight ing in the holloWs, there was fighting
 on the hills, there was fighting in the trees, for so the dry grass was to these pigmies and over it all non- combatant giant could have slain a hundred with his heel at one crunch had he listed, loomed with large inter- est.
 Even under the magnifying glass no difference between an invader and a
 citizen of the invaded town could be discerned. Some of either army were larger than others, but all were of the
 same general shape and coloring. How in the scattering skirmish line single ant could know another ant for j mortal foe 1t is most difficult to imag- in, but there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. Possibly the means of recognition all lay in those delicate and extremely sensitive twirlers at the forehead, or perhaps the eyes, which were to be seen only through the glass, were gifted with keener vision than that of human kind. Even Thoreau. who knew so much about ants and their battles, never could decide this point.
 But now the great war has been carried we'll within the outer walls of the city. The Trojans are growing less calm. Those not yet in the fight are coming on valiantly, and Greeks, mettlesome and hardy hough they be,
 are finding foemen worthy of their pin- cers. Here small ant, set upon by a greater one Is aided by a fellow-co
 batant. and the aggressor is fairly torn | in two between them. His head lies
 upon the field and the small war rior walks back toward the. city with his body Evidently Hell
 lenic warrior has come to grief. But now is he avenged, for a soldier of about the same size as his carrier-off comes suddenly from behind a grass root and pounces upon the Trojan and takes a death grip upon him. The
 mandibles meet just behind the head
 and over the hairlike neck. This strug- | gle is a short one.
 | In the middle of the cowpath the | steady stream of marching Greeks pours on to the front in guerilla like | disorder. The front itself is most hazy | of delineation. Some of it, where four or five sets of duellists are enjoying | royal fights at the very doors of the | Trojans' houses, is pushed away from
 the central fight by the mere act on the part of some of the combatants of I dragging the ants who have engaged them up the slope off the path, and | sometimes right into the caverns, where there remains little doubt as to the fate | of the dragged, though the dragger l himself may have lost his esteemed head before he is through with it. | At times a warrior who was being | lifted bodily and hustled off toward a hole would get good hold upon a blade
 of grass or twig and do some lifting
 himself Then the one who had been
 doing the hustling would find himself
 hustled in turn and borne back from
 the Trojan citadel.
 | But these were mere external combats
 apart from the main engagement in the coWpath and along its borders. There,