tell you, for your own good. Guided by his noisy demonstration, the hornet spied him on his twig, and in a second had pounced upon him and, like a highwayman, stabbed him to the heart with a poisoned javelin. This cut short his song, as you may well suppose, and he fell in the grasp of his assailant. In another moment the hornet got a fresh hold upon him, and though your ancestor, like yourself, was much bigger than the hornet, those powerful, buzzing wings made an easy burden of him for quite a distance across the meadow. Here our captor took a rest, and after tugging that helpless cicada some distance up a high fence-rail, started off on another flight, which was brought to an end in the grass at the foot of a tree. In a moment more the hornet was seen tugging its huge load up the trunk. When some ten feet in height a third flight was made, this time gradually settling down on the roof of a shed down-hill. Tugging his game to the edge of the shed roof, a fourth trip was made, and this landed the two in the neighborhood of a sand bank at the roadside in the valley below. A sand bank of some sort is usually the terminus of this strange ride of the cicada. Thus far many curious observers have followed the two, and wondered what it was all about. If they had cared to follow the matter to the end, they would doubtless have wondered still more at the strange fate which awaited the unlucky harvest-fly, whose last song had been his own requiem. The sand-hornet is also known as the "digger-wasp," the largest of its kind, the most formidable of all our hornets, and carrying within its black, yellow-spotted body a most searching and terrible poisoned sting. It was a common belief in ancient times that "seventeen pricks of a hornet" would "kill a man," to quote from Pliny; and there are many country people to-day who would as quickly attack a rattlesnake as this big sand-hornet, and who "absolutely know" of men who have been "knocked down" and even "killed" by one stab of its sting. However this may be, it is well to keep at a respectful distance. When we know what the little yellow-jacket can do with its tiny dagger, and then reflect that this sand-hornet's javelin is about a third of an inch long, we can draw our own conclusions, and will readily understand why it was that our cicada's song was cut short. "But why didn't the hornet eat him on the spot? Why should it fly away with him and yank him about so unmercifully?" This is a common question with those who have observed the episode above described. A visit to the sand bank would have explained the object of it all. The exposed surface is seen to be perforated here and there with holes as large as one's little finger, while from one of them an occasional tiny stream of sand pours out, and we catch a glimpse of the horny, spiked legs of the digger-wasp within. Even as we observe him closely a loud hum is heard, and a filmy, buzzing object falls precipitately upon the bank, and in the