Within doors, in the tropics, ants are apt to put themselves obtrusively forward in a manner little gratifying to any except the enthusiastically entomological mind.  The winged females, after their marriage flight, have a disagreeable habit of flying in at the open doors and windows at lunch time, settling upon the table like the Harpies in the AEneid, and then quietly shuffling off their wings one at a time, by holding them down against the table-cloth with one leg, and running away vigorously with the five others.  As soon as they have thus disembarrassed themselves of their superfluous members, they proceed to run about over the lunch as if the house belonged to them, and to make a series of experiments upon the edible qualities of the different dishes.  One doesn’t so much mind their philosophical inquiries into the nature of the bread or even the meat; but when they come to drowning themselves by dozens, in the pursuit of knowledge, in the soup and sherry, one feels bound to protest energetically against the spirit of martyrdom by which they are too profoundly animated.  That is one of the slight drawbacks of the realms of perpetual summer; in the poets you see only one side of the picture—­the palms, the orchids, the humming-birds, the great trailing lianas:  in practical life you see the reverse side—­the thermometer at 98 deg., the tepid drinking-water, the prickly heat, the perpetual languor, the endless shoals of aggressive insects.  A lady of my acquaintance, indeed, made a valuable entomological collection in her own dining-room, by the simple process of consigning to pill-boxes all the moths and flies and beetles that settled upon the mangoes and star-apples in the course of dessert.

Another objectionable habit of the tropical ants, viewed practically, is their total disregard of vested interests in the case of house property.  Like Mr. George and his communistic friends, they disbelieve entirely in the principle of private rights in real estate.  They will eat their way through the beams of your house till there is only a slender core of solid wood left to support the entire burden.  I have taken down a rafter in my own house in Jamaica, originally 18 inches thick each way, with a sound circular centre of no more than 6 inches in diameter, upon which all the weight necessarily fell.  With the material extracted from the wooden beams they proceed to add insult to injury by building long covered galleries right across the ceiling of your drawing-room.  As may be easily imagined, these galleries do not tend to improve the appearance of the ceiling; and it becomes necessary to form a Liberty and Property Defence League for the protection of one’s personal interests against the insect enemy.  I have no objection to ants building galleries on their own freehold, or even to their nationalising the land in their native forests; but I do object strongly to their unwarrantable intrusion upon the domain of private life.  Expostulation