After lunch, Lillian Nieman, who lives three houses down the street, will come up and ask if she may bring her cousin (just on from the West) to play a set until someone wants the court.  Lillian’s cousin has never played tennis before but she has done a lot of croquet and thinks she ought to pick tennis up rather easily.  For three hours there is a great deal of screaming, with Lillian and her cousin hitting the ball an aggregate of eleven times, while Daddy patters up and down the side-lines, all dressed up in white, practising shots against the netting.

Finally, the girls will ask him to play with them, and he will thank them and say that he has to go in the house now as he is all perspiration and is afraid of catching cold.

After dinner there is dancing on the court by the young people.  Anyway, Daddy is getting pretty old for tennis.

XII

DO INSECTS THINK?

In a recent book entitled, “The Psychic Life of Insects,” Professor Bouvier says that we must be careful not to credit the little winged fellows with intelligence when they behave in what seems like an intelligent manner.  They may be only reacting.  I would like to confront the Professor with an instance of reasoning power on the part of an insect which can not be explained away in any such manner.

During the summer of 1899, while I was at work on my treatise “Do Larvae Laugh,” we kept a female wasp at our cottage in the Adirondacks.  It really was more like a child of our own than a wasp, except that it looked more like a wasp than a child of our own.  That was one of the ways we told the difference.

It was still a young wasp when we got it (thirteen or fourteen years old) and for some time we could not get it to eat or drink, it was so shy.  Since it was a, female, we decided to call it Miriam, but soon the children’s nickname for it—­“Pudge”—­became a fixture, and “Pudge” it was from that time on.

One evening I had been working late in my laboratory fooling round with some gin and other chemicals, and in leaving the room I tripped over a nine of diamonds which someone had left lying on the floor and knocked over my card catalogue containing the names and addresses of all the larvae worth knowing in North America.  The cards went everywhere.

I was too tired to stop to pick them up that night, and went sobbing to bed, just as mad as I could be.  As I went, however, I noticed the wasp flying about in circles over the scattered cards.  “Maybe Pudge will pick them up,” I said half-laughingly to myself, never thinking for one moment that such would be the case.