"Well, it would be too long a story to tell of how all the entomologists went to work studying the grasshoppers and their ways: their outsides and insides, their hopping and their flying, their egg-laying and the growth and development of the little hoppers; how the birds, and what kinds, stuffed on them, and the robber-flies and the tachina flies and the red mites and the tiny braconids and chalcids attacked them and laid eggs on them, and their grubs burrowed into them; and everything else about them. But all the time the hoppers kept right on eating; at least they did where there was anything left to eat. Stories were told of their following roots of plants and trees down into the ground to eat them; of how they stripped great trees of bark and branches; of how they massed on the warm rails of railroads at nights and stopped trains; of how enterprising towns by offering rewards to farmers collected and killed with kerosene great winrows and mounds composed of innumerable bushels and tons of grasshoppers. "Some people of active mind and fertile imagination suggested that if the grasshoppers were going to eat up all our usual food, we should learn to eat _them_! And they got chemists to figure out how much proteids and carbohydrates and hydrocarbons and ash, etc., there was in every little hopper's body. And there was a remarkable dinner given in St. Louis by a famous entomologist to some prominent men of that city, in which grasshoppers were served in several different ways: hopper _sauté_, hopper _au gratin_, hopper _escalloppé_, hopper _soufflé_, and so on. The decision of the guests--those who lasted through the dinner--was that 'the dry and chippy character of the tibiæ was a serious objection to grasshoppers as food for man.' "But you want to know the end of it Mary, don't you? Well, it was a very simple end. Simply, indeed, that the hoppers went back! Yes, actually, when autumn came they all--that is, all that hadn't been eaten by birds and toads and lizards, or collected by farmers and burned, or hadn't got walked on by horses and people, or hadn't got studied to death by entomologists--flew up into the air and sailed back to the Rocky Mountains. Or at least they started that way. I never heard if any of them really got all the thousand of miles back. But whereas in the summer they had all been flying southeast, in the fall they all began flying northwest.