second day of tribulation fell in with the little spaniel who was nursing the three other puppies. 'Oh,' says Puss, putting up her back, 'it is you who have stolen my children.' 'No,' replied the spaniel with a snarl; 'they are my own flesh and blood.' 'That won't do,' said the cat; 'I'll take my oath before any justice of the peace that you have my two puppies.' Thereupon issue was joined; that is to say, there was a desperate combat, which ended in the defeat of the spaniel, and in the cat walking off proudly with one of the puppies, which she took to her own bed. Having deposited this one, she returned, fought again, gained another victory, and redeemed another puppy. Now, it is very singular that she should have only taken two, the exact number she had been deprived of. The following instance of maternal courage and affection is worthy of admiration: A cat who had a numerous brood of kittens, one sunny day in spring, encouraged her little ones to frolic in the beams of noon about the stable-door. While she was joining them in a thousand sportive tricks and gambols, they were discovered by a large hawk, who was sailing above the barnyard in expectation of prey. In a moment, swift as lightning, the hawk darted upon one of the kittens, and had as quickly borne it off, but for the courageous mother, who, seeing the danger of her offspring, flew on the common enemy, who, to defend itself, let fall the prize. The battle presently became seemingly dreadful to both parties; for the hawk, by the power of his wings, the sharpness of his talons, and the keenness of his beak, had for a while the advantage, cruelly lacerating the poor cat, and had actually deprived her of one eye in the conflict; but Puss, no way daunted by this accident, strove with all her cunning and agility for her little ones, till she had broken the wing of her adversary. In this state she got him more within the power of her claws, the hawk still defending himself apparently with additional vigour; and the fight continued with equal fury on the side of the cat, to the great entertainment of many spectators. At length victory seemed to favour the nearly exhausted mother, and she availed herself of the advantage; for, by an instantaneous exertion, she laid the hawk motionless beneath her feet, and, as if exulting in the victory, tore off the head of the vanquished tyrant. Disregarding the loss of her eye, she immediately ran to the bleeding kitten, licked the wounds inflicted by the hawk's talons on its tender sides, purring while she caressed her liberated offspring, with the same maternal affection as if no danger had assailed them or their affectionate parent. TO A CHILD. 1. My fairest child, I have no song to give you; 2. Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever; G Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, Buzz! Do you hear me? I am a wasp. Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, Buzz! Do you see me? I tell you I am a wasp again. You have come out to take a walk up the hill, and I am flying and fluttering about the hedge beside you; and when you really do know me, you scream, and give a jump and a start. Ha! ha! ha! What do you take me for? And whatever do you think I came into the world to do? I will tell you. I build. You know Mr Stone, the mason, don't you? And Mr Clay, the plasterer? And Mr Wood, the carpenter? They build, you are sure, because you have seen them climbing up the ladders, and patting with their trowels, and sawing and boring, and screwing and gluing, and knocking very hard with big hammers on to little nails. It Well, then, I build too. I am just as clever as they. But they are all of them men, and I am a lady! That is funny; and I thought it would make you laugh, But it is so with all of us wasps. is the ladies always who build the places for us to live in. What if you were to see all your sisters, and mothers, and grandmothers, and aunts carrying brick-hods, and fixing slates to roof-tops, and hauling up chimneys, and hammering round gutters, and banging down pavements, and fastening knockers and bell-handles on to big high doors? You would be ashamed, I know. You would say: 'Go in, go in; baste the meat; whip the eggs; starch the wrist-bands; put clean frocks on to the babies; give physic to the sick; sit by them of nights; read to them when the pain is hurting; give kisses to them when they can sit up again, and they are going to be well.' But it is different with a lady-wasp like me. My husband has to go out foraging—that is, hunting for food, you know; and it is very hard and dangerous; and so I, the lady, build the house for him to come back to, and I don't grumble at having to do it, because I like it, and I think it is good for everybody to be busy. I will tell you now how I begin. I have first to get a hollow in the earth, about two feet across; that is about as tall as up to your papa's knees. If some little fieldmouse or mole has made this hollow and then gone away, I am very glad, because then I need not trouble; but if I cannot find one, I set to and burrow one for myself. I have very strong mandibles, jaws that would look to you very like lobster's claws if you could see them magnified; and with these I dig the earth, and throw all that I do not want away. I dig a little passage about an inch high, and about twenty inches long-as big, let us say, as two of your hoop-sticks laid end to end together. I build this passage zigzag, not straight. I do that because I want to keep my house a secret. I don't want all the ants, and earwigs, and bumble-bees, and spiders to walk right in, and find out the little cells where all my baby-grubs are lying. And at the end of this passage I dig out the hollow. Do not forget that it is about as tall as up to your papa's knees, and it is about the same width. Well: I line the roof of it with paper. What colour? A colour half like blue and half like gray. And where do I get it from? Why, I make it, to be sure. I fly to a wooden post, or a wooden window-frame, where the paint has been worn away, and I tear off tiny tiny threads of wood, finer than a hair, and so short, you would have to put half a dozen of them in a line to be the same length as your thumb-nail. I gather these little tiny threads into a bundle with my feet; I wet them with a sort of glue out of my mouth; and I knead them into a wee lump of pulp or dough, something like what your cook does when she mixes flour and suet and water together when she is making an apple-dumpling. I fly away with this lump of dough, I go into my hollow, and I settle on the ceiling. Then I stand on the lump, and I press it out, walking backwards and backwards, and spreading it with my mandibles and my tongue and feet, and at last there it is, sticking on very thin and nice, looking like what you would call tissue-paper. But one sheet of this paper is not enough. I put it there, so that the ceiling and walls of my earth-house shall not fall in. Little sprinkles of earth tumbling down would soon spoil my pretty cells, and if some great heavy cow trod her hoof on the ground very hard one day, she might shake such large lumps down, we should be broken in upon altogether. So I spread fifteen or sixteen layers of paper, one after the other, one after the other, till the lining they make is nearly two inches thick. Then my house, so far, is done. But if I laid my babies loose in this, the top ones would crush the under ones, and I should have nothing but a heap of dead babies, which I should not like at all. So this is how I manage. I make about twenty little pillars or columns of my blue-gray paper, an inch long, and a quarter of an inch across, hanging down from the ceiling of my house. These are to hold up a floor, or terrace, of cells; and I make this floor round, not quite so large as my whole house, so as to leave room for us to crawl up |