The air was so clear this day that it seemed as if we could see each individual great redwood, each red-trunked, glossy-leaved madroño, each thicket of crooked manzanita and purpling Ceanothus, on the whole mountain side. Straight across through the clear blue-tinged atmosphere above the cañada to the shoulders and cañons, the forests and clear spaces and chaparral of the mountain flanks, we look. And it rests our eyes that are so tired of reading. It is good to be a-stretch on sunbathed Bungalow Hill this afternoon in October. The rains will be coming in a few weeks and then we can't be out so much. Or at any rate we can't lie close to the warm, brown, dry earth as we can now. But the rains will bring the fresh, green grasses and the flowers. If they come early enough the manzanitas will have on their little trembling pink-white lily-of-the-valley bells by Christmas-day, and the wild currants will be all green-and-rose color, with little leaves and a myriad fragrant blossoms. But Mary has found something. She had turned over a little flattish stone and under it was--life! Living things disturbed in their work, their play, their laying up of riches, their care of their children; little animate creatures revealed in all the intimacies of their housekeeping and daily life. But they didn't lose their presence of mind, these active, knowing little ants, when the Catastrophe came. There was work to be done at once and wisely. First, the saving of the children; and so in the moment that passed between Mary's overturning of the stone and our immediate shifting into comfortable position on our stomachs, head in hands, for watching, half of the racing workers had each a little white parcel in its jaws and was speeding with it along the galleries toward the underground chambers. "Ants' eggs," said Mary. "No," said I. "That's a popular delusion. These little white things are not ants' eggs, but ants' babies. They are the already hatched and partly grown young ants, the larvæ and pupæ, which are so well looked after by the nurse ants. For these young ants are quite helpless, like young bees in the brood-cells in a honey-bee hive. And they have to be fed chewed food, and as they have no legs and so can't walk, they have to be carried from the cool dark nurseries up into the warmer lighter chambers for air and heat every day almost, and then carried back down again. See how gently the nurse ant holds this baby in its jaws; jaws that are sharp and strong and that can bite fiercely and hold on grimly in battle."