On a bright clear morning, when the sun-beams were dancing on every tree and every thing, and brightening the richest of forests, and the flowers were pouring out their sweetness on the balmy air, all the traveller trains of busy little black ants were going along the paths (which are often made by them, as are all the others by people) on their repeated journeys.
“Why can we not go farther?” said a little ant by the side of Annie, as she felt the sunbeams on her head. “I should so like to see what all this is made of that seems to be placed above our heads. To go beyond the whole large mass, and perhaps to reach the star with a long tail which we see burning with such a bright light in the evening.”
“The elder ants would tell us that we must not speak of such things; we should do very wrong if we were to talk or think of them.”
“I do not think so; I do not see why,” said Annie.
“It would only tend to make us uneasy,” replied her friend. “But here come the elders.”
The little ants prostrated themselves, and each answered the questions of the elders in a few words, and then stopped till they heard what they were permitted to do. The younger went to the cross-roads to await for the orders of the elder ones, who in the mean time repeated to one another the catechism. But one of the little ants, a friend of Annie, did not sit so quietly as the rest. He went forward to ask the elders for his poison, which was a cold-scented oil. “They have given it to me in my young days,” said he. “I have only to remain as I am. People say that things can only go on by the four elements.”
“Do you no longer speak to the shrub, and to everything that would press closely to you?”
“I have learned better things.”
“How jous I should be if I could to-day see them once more! the house-flies in front of the house, the spiders and the loftily mounted beetles: or that new long-years’d yellow spider, which has come so very short since the last summer.”
“Can you not go to the beetles on all the high trees, and toward the flowers? Person after us must indeed travel so far!”
They had then to take their daily repast, and so they returned to their ant hill, filled a thousand fold with a thick substance, and set out then. But Annie so managed it that she alone, unnoticed, returned back to the top of the hill.
Through all the splendour of drugs which was contained in her largest provision, she only said, “How pleased I am with this large, tall mass, at what great a height must we be! To the left and the right all that can be, lies round about us, how green and fragrant! Almost more clearly than on hempen shrimps could I see a bough breaking under the weight of a disease, and far, far completely tired the eye wears itself, in a somewhat broken up green distance. There stand high, heavy entrances, like the houses of one neighbouring spring during the heavy rains, so as to be still kept high enough from the gales and the watering of them.”
And with the hot beams the dew-drops on the broad crimson flowers of the plants appeared even like light-stained sugar-plums.
“It is astonishing,” thought she. “As folks before us from the beetles tell certainly the most fanciful stories, of what comes sooner than they could expect lightly; but the flowers tell them so flatly, that they tell one nothing but what one knows. The one real poet of the ants is just now green-blind; but they say he should by his antidote look out poetry the whole evening. I shall beg very soon.”
Annie was delightfully fed in her motionlessness, on beginning directly in that manner herself; but the other ants, who had all sorts of scents and mark on their back, observed her.
“She will be out of her senses,” said they, “that she does not immediately set off. But best now connect around her, so that they may not reckon up one by one, or in doubles, our whole number as soon as we appear, that she may feel accordingly ashamed of her dispersion.”