It pleased the queen that here, in this spot, she would found her a city.  But first she must, as it were, take the latitude and the longitude of this her stronghold to be.  She must know where her city was, must make absolutely dead sure, certain, of finding it again when she went out.  Otherwise, if she lost it—­well, there would be an end to it before it had begun, so to speak.  For this purpose, therefore, she rose slowly, humming to herself some royal incantation—­rose, upon a gradually widening corkscrew spiral, into the air.

She was, in point of fact, surveying the district round her capital to be, marking each point—­bush, stone, grass-tuft, tree-trunk, flower-cluster, clod, branch, anything and everything, great and small—­and jotting down in indelible memory fluid, upon whatever she kept for a brain, just precisely the position of every landmark.  And as she rose her circles ever widened, so that at last her big compound eyes took in quite a big stretch of sunlit picture, to be photographed upon her memory, and there remain forevermore.

It took her some time, for it was some job; but once done, it was done for good.

Next, alighting with great hustle—­now that the work was once begun—­the queen ran into her tunnel, and made sure that nobody had “jumped her claim” in the interval.  She found an ant, red and ravenous, taking too professional an interest in the place, and she abolished that ant with one nip; though, as you may be sure, the tiny insect fought like a bulldog.

Then she executed a shallow excavation upon the site of the future city itself, carrying each pellet of earth outside beyond the entrance.  This also took time, though she worked at fever-pitch, almost with fury; but she managed to finish it, and fly away into the landscape in a remarkably short while, considering.

Here once again she appeared to be searching for something through the yellow sunshine and the falling blossom-petals—­confetti from Spring’s wedding.  And presently she found it, or seemed to—­an old gate, off its hinges.  But the wood was rotting, and she was no fool.  She knew her job—­the job she had never done before, by the way—­and after humming around it in a fretful, undecided sort of fashion for some while, she flew on.  Apparently she was looking for wood, but not any wood.  Cut wood appeared to be her desire, and that oak; at least, she put behind her a deal board lying half-overgrown, after one careful professional inspection.

Her way was through a perilous world, beset by a thousand foes, mostly in the nature of traps and lines and barbed-wire entanglements set by spiders.  As a rule you didn’t see these last at all—­nor did she; but her yellow-and-black badge usually won her a way of respect—­and hate—­and she cut or struggled herself clear of such web-lines as her feelers failed to spot in time.

At last she found some real oak rails, and set to work upon them at once, planing with her sharp shear-jaws.  A tiger-beetle, gaudy and hungry-eyed, sought to pounce upon her in this task.  He was long-legged, and keen, and lean, and very swift; but she shot aloft just in time; and when she came down again, with a z-zzzzp, as quickly as she went up, sting first, he had wisely dodged into a cranny, where he defied her with open and jagged jaws.