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 with honey from the bottom of the broken flower tubes. This red-clover honey was a delicacy which, though she might sniff its perfume longingly, she could never hope to taste except by lucky accident; for at the base of those deep, narrow-tubed blossoms it was beyond the reach of all despoilers but the long-tongued bumblebees. Now, in the golden warmth, hummed over by tiny, envious flies who were careful not to come within reach of her mandibles, she was lapping up the nectar and enjoying herself as if she had not a duty or responsibility in the world.

But Formica, though much more independent, more conscious of her individual rights than, for instance, that communistic automaton, the bee, was a most responsible little personage, aware of all her duties to the state. When she had absorbed all the clover honey she could hold she climbed down from the ruined blossom and glanced about, waving her antennse, in the hope of finding something worth taking home to the state larder. At this moment there was a rustling among the grass stems, and a tiny, grayish-brown shrewmouse, looking to Formica as huge as an elephant, came scurrying by with a shining bluebottle fly gripped in his jaws. As he crossed the open space where the clover was trodden down there came a fierce rush of wind that nearly swept Formica from her