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, build like wasps, work hard like wasps, rob like wasps; then, like the wasps, they will be the terror of all around, and kill and eat all their enemies.  Soon they will call themselves The Wasps.  They will boast that their king’s father or grandfather, and soon that the ancestor of the whole tribe was an actual wasp; and the wasp will become at once their eponym hero, their deity, their ideal, their civiliser; who has taught them to build a kraal of huts, as he taught his children to build a hive.

Now, if there should come to any thinking man of this tribe, at this epoch, the new thought—­Who made the world? he will be sorely puzzled.  The conception of a world has never crossed his mind before.  He never pictured to himself anything beyond the nearest ridge of mountains; and as for a Maker, that will be a greater puzzle still.  What makers or builders more cunning than those wasps of whom his foolish head is full?  Of course, he sees it now.  A Wasp made the world; which to him entirely new