Observe another singularity: shall we call it a trivial one? No; to the serious observer it is of importance. The city has two gates; its people enter by the one, and pass out by the other, so that no confusion can take place, and no collision between the ingressing and egressing crowds. This plan is adopted by all people who economize time, and wish to transact their business expeditiously. In London, the rule is the same as with the wasps: on the one side those who are coming, on the other those who are going; each person keeps to the right; these take one footpath, those another. No such impediment is met with in the Strand as the idlers of our Rue Vivienne, who incessantly convert themselves into a serious obstacle, and swim laboriously in the confusion they create. * * * * * But to return to our subject. What is the object of these constructions? Is this robust being, endowed with such an intensity of vital force, more afraid of the air than numbers of delicate insects,--than the nervous spider, which has only a house of thread, or even lives under a leaf? Therein lies the lofty mystery of life for the higher insect. It is this which stimulates the universal genius of the ant either above ground or under ground. It is this which inspires the activity, the persevering toil and economy of the bee. What, then, is it? The _love of the future_,--the yearning to perpetuate and eternize that which one loves. All their love centres in their offspring. [Illustration] To love the child and the future; to toil in view of time and of that which as yet is not; to exhaust their vitality and die of work, that posterity may have less cause to labour,--a noble ideal, assuredly, of society, wherever it may be. One can well understand it in those who have time before them, and a life to make use of, like men and bees. But that this insect which has no time, which perishes in the evening, should love the time that will never be its own, should immolate its little life for the sake of the life that is to come, should devote to the child of to-morrow its solitary day, is a sacrifice peculiar to the wasp: it is original and sublime! There is not a minute to lose; and the mother incessantly increases the burden. Besides the female workers, she produces some few males who do not work, whose little and very brief function scarcely prevails as an excuse for their inactivity. Among those tragical and serious insect-races, Nature, as if to divert herself a moment by a comical distraction, has made the poor little males ordinarily squat and obese, innocent little Falstaffs, who are guarded like a seraglio of unimportant servants. The caricature is complete in the case of the male bee, which, alleging that it neither knows how to glean abroad nor to build at home, passes the time in humming before its bee-hive (like our young cigar-smoking idlers).