One day he found some ants eating mo-las-ses out of a little jar in a closet.  He shook them out.  Then he tied a string to the jar, and hung it on a nail in the ceiling.  But he had not got all the ants out of the jar.  One little ant liked sweet things so well that he staid in the jar, and kept on eating like a greedy boy.

[Illustration:  Ants talking (magnified)]

At last when this greedy ant had eaten all that he could, he started to go home.  Frank-lin saw him climb over the rim of the jar.  Then the ant ran down the outside of the jar.  But when he got to the bottom, he did not find any shelf there.  He went all round the jar.  There was no way to get down to the floor.  The ant ran this way and that way, but he could not get down.

[Illustration:  An Ants Feeler (magnified)]

At last the greedy ant thought he would see if he could go up.  He climbed up the string to the ceiling.  Then he went down the wall.  He came to his own hole at last, no doubt.

After a while he got hungry again, perhaps.  He thought about that jar of sweets at the end of a string.  Then perhaps he told the other ants.  Maybe he let them know that there was a string by which they could get down to the jar.

In about half an hour after the ant had gone up the string, Franklin saw a swarm of ants going down the string.  They marched in a line, one after another.  Soon there were two lines of ants on the string.  The ants in one line were going down to get at the sweet food.  The ants in the other line were marching up the other side of the string to go home.  Do you think that the greedy ant told the other ants about the jar?

And did he tell them that there was a string by which an ant could get there?

And did he tell it by speaking, or by signs that he made with his feelers?

If you watch two ants when they meet, you will see that they touch their feelers together, as if they said “Good-morning!”

[Illustration:  Franklin asks the sunshine something.]

One day Franklin was eating dinner at the house of a friend.  The lady of the house, when she poured out the coffee, found that it was not hot.

She said, “I am sorry that the coffee is cold.  It is because the servant forgot to scour the coffee-pot.  Coffee gets cold more quickly when the coffee-pot is not bright.”

This set Franklin to thinking.  He thought that a black or dull thing would cool more quickly than a white or bright one.  That made him think that a black thing would take in heat more quickly than a white one.

He wanted to find out if this were true or not.  There was no-body who knew, so there was no-body to ask.  But Franklin thought that he would ask the sunshine.  Maybe the sunshine would tell him whether a black thing would heat more quickly than a white thing.

But how could he ask the sunshine?