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 blossoms were thronged with pollen hunters and hummed about with innumerable wings. Sober brown bees dusted over with the lemon-colored rose pollen, darting iridescent flies, irresponsible yellow butterflies and black-and-yellow wasps, swift and fiercely intent on their hunting—all found the glowing rosebush their focus of interest or of fate.

A black-and-white dog from the farmhouse on the hillside above the pasture came trotting up to the fence sniffing for rabbit tracks, and as he passed the rosebush one of the busy wasps buzzed close at his ear. Thoughtlessly—mistaking it, in his absorption, for a big fly—he snapped at it and caught it. With a yelp of surprise he spat it out again violently and began to paw at his smarting muzzle. Finding this quite ineffective to allay the fiery torment in his tongue, he raced off, whimpering, with his tail between his legs, to plunge his mouth into the soothing chill of the horse trough in the farmyard.

The wasp, meanwhile, her wings disabled and daubed with saliva, but still very much alive and furiously angry, had fallen upon the very center of the teeming ant hill, and almost, so to speak, under Formica's nose. Formica, with a courage and a self-sacrifice beyond all praise, instantly seized the dreadful monster by a wing. Her