the cool shade of the larder, where she had been carving meat, and “when the sun mended his twisted copper nets,” he would flash in bronze from her glistening cuirass as she droned by high over some wriggling grub, caterpillar, or palsied fly fast locked in her jaws—­and all for her young, all for her couple of dozen legless horrors, hanging by their tails, each in its narrow cell, in darkness and in dead silence, in the embryo city under the secret earth.

Time was when these same grubs grew so fat and big that they no longer hung, but became fast wedged in their dormitories; time when the queen had to set to and extend downwards the wall of each cell lest the growing inmates bulge over, and, obsessed with their ravening hunger, incontinently eat each other; and time at last when, one after the other, each grub, having grown out of more than one suit of clothes and donned new ones, cast its skin for the last time, refused all further food, spun a cocoon of silk with a dome-shaped silken floor to each cell, and for a period retired from the prying eyes of the world, even of its own mother, into the sacred sanctuary of the chrysalis state.  Then the queen’s labor lightened a little for a period, so that you could again see her at spare moments sucking nectar from the flowers for herself, robbing the jam-dish, or lapping up the “honey-dew” of the green-fly.

Finally came the day.  It dawned all right, and there was nothing about it to show that it was going to be different from any other fine day; yet, as soon as the wasp woke up, she knew that, for her, it was the day of Fate.

A very cursory inspection of the budding city showed at once that during the night things had been happening and changes taking place.  The domed floors of several of the cells were palpitating with life from within, and there were sounds of the gnawing and tearing of the silken screens.

The queen became greatly excited, and began to hum and dance a little step-dance to herself, all alone in the darkness among the cells, as she saw her triumph evolving before her eyes.  And, almost as if the hum had called it, there rushed at her, out of the blackness across the comb, a—­a thing.

She knew by instinct that it was an enemy.  Indeed, it could not well be anything else, but it fought like a black devil.

It was, in point of fact, a mole-cricket, a creature just like its namesake, if an insect can be said to resemble an animal, only that its jaws were like unto the jaws of a lobster.  It was a fearsome apparition, and very much larger even than the queen.  The good God alone knoweth why it had chosen that moment and place to run apparently amok.

But, if the mole-cricket ran amok, the queen-wasp went berserk.  It was a thing unthinkable that in that moment of triumph she, and the awakening city with her, should be cut off—­unthinkable and impossible, unthinkable and maddening.  Therefore she fought as few wasps have probably fought before or since, and they are pretty expert exponents, and scarcely backward ones, of warfare.