We followed the carriage-road, and had our usual luck; we traveled under a beating sun, and always saw the shade leave the shady places before we could get to them.  In all our wanderings we seldom managed to strike a piece of road at its time for being shady.  We had a particularly hot time of it on that particular afternoon, and with no comfort but what we could get out of the fact that the peasants at work away up on the steep mountainsides above our heads were even worse off than we were.  By and by it became impossible to endure the intolerable glare and heat any longer; so we struck across the ravine and entered the deep cool twilight of the forest, to hunt for what the guide-book called the “old road.”

We found an old road, and it proved eventually to be the right one, though we followed it at the time with the conviction that it was the wrong one.  If it was the wrong one there could be no use in hurrying; therefore we did not hurry, but sat down frequently on the soft moss and enjoyed the restful quiet and shade of the forest solitudes.  There had been distractions in the carriage-road —­school-children, peasants, wagons, troops of pedestrianizing students from all over Germany —­but we had the old road to ourselves.

Now and then, while we rested, we watched the laborious ant at his work.  I found nothing new in him—­certainly nothing to change my opinion of him.  It seems to me that in the matter of intellect the ant must be a strangely overrated bird.  During many summers, now, I have watched him, when I ought to have been in better business, and I have not yet come across a living ant that seemed to have any more sense than a dead one.  I refer to the ordinary ant, of course; I have had no experience of those wonderful Swiss and African ones which vote, keep drilled armies, hold slaves, and dispute about religion.  Those particular ants may be all that the naturalist paints them, but I am persuaded that the average ant is a sham.  I admit his industry, of course; he is the hardest-working creature in the world—­when anybody is looking—­but his leather-headedness is the point I make against him.  He goes out foraging, he makes a capture, and then what does he do?  Go home?  No—­he goes anywhere but home.  He doesn’t know where home is.  His home may be only three feet away—­no matter, he can’t find it.  He makes his capture, as I have said; it is generally something which can be of no sort of use to himself or anybody else; it is usually seven times bigger than it ought to be; he hunts out the awkwardest place to take hold of it; he lifts it bodily up in the air by main force, and starts; not toward home, but in the opposite direction; not calmly and wisely, but with a frantic haste which is wasteful of his strength; he fetches up against a pebble, and instead of going around it, he climbs over it backward dragging his booty after him, tumbles down on the other side, jumps up in a passion, kicks the dust off his clothes, moistens his hands, grabs