There in the Black Forest, on the mountainside, I saw an ant go through with such a performance as this with a dead spider of fully ten times his own weight.  The spider was not quite dead, but too far gone to resist.  He had a round body the size of a pea.  The little ant —­observing that I was noticing—­turned him on his back, sunk his fangs into his throat, lifted him into the air and started vigorously off with him, stumbling over little pebbles, stepping on the spider’s legs and tripping himself up, dragging him backward, shoving him bodily ahead, dragging him up stones six inches high instead of going around them, climbing weeds twenty times his own height and jumping from their summits—­and finally leaving him in the middle of the road to be confiscated by any other fool of an ant that wanted him.  I measured the ground which this ass traversed, and arrived at the conclusion that what he had accomplished inside of twenty minutes would constitute some such job as this—­relatively speaking—­for a man; to wit:  to strap two eight-hundred-pound horses together, carry them eighteen hundred feet, mainly over (not around) boulders averaging six feet high, and in the course of the journey climb up and jump from the top of one precipice like Niagara, and three steeples, each a hundred and twenty feet high; and then put the horses down, in an exposed place, without anybody to watch them, and go off to indulge in some other idiotic miracle for vanity’s sake.

Science has recently discovered that the ant does not lay up anything for winter use.  This will knock him out of literature, to some extent.  He does not work, except when people are looking, and only then when the observer has a green, naturalistic look, and seems to be taking notes.  This amounts to deception, and will injure him for the Sunday-schools.  He has not judgment enough to know what is good to eat from what isn’t.  This amounts to ignorance, and will impair the world’s respect for him.  He cannot stroll around a stump and find his way home again.  This amounts to idiocy, and once the damaging fact is established, thoughtful people will cease to look up to him, the sentimental will cease to fondle him.  His vaunted industry is but a vanity and of no effect, since he never gets home with anything he starts with.  This disposes of the last remnant of his reputation and wholly destroys his main usefulness as a moral agent, since it will make the sluggard hesitate to go to him any more.  It is strange, beyond comprehension, that so manifest a humbug as the ant has been able to fool so many nations and keep it up so many ages without being found out.

The ant is strong, but we saw another strong thing, where we had not suspected the presence of much muscular power before.  A toadstool—­that vegetable which springs to full growth in a single night—­had torn loose and lifted a matted mass of pine needles and dirt of twice its own bulk into the air, and supported it there, like a column supporting a shed.  Ten thousand toadstools, with the right purchase, could lift a man, I suppose.  But what good would it do?