A sudden commotion on the sunlit ground recalled his attention to the ants. Two of them had seized hold of a tiny leaf, one on each side, but they seemed unable to agree on which way it should go. They tugged in opposite directions. First one of them found firm footing in a half-buried pebble and dragged the other one, its feet scrabbling madly in loose sand. Then the second ant got a purchase on the pebble and in turn triumphantly wrestled the leaf, and its struggling rival for a fraction of an inch in _its_ chosen direction. Both ants kept skidding. Dicky bent close to watch them, a well of pure, delighted amusement bubbling up inside him. Suddenly it all seemed irresistibly funny--that grim Lilliputian determination see-sawing across a pebble just when he’d been thinking of the frog and how he’d laughed at the funny frog-- Dicky felt the spasm starting in his stomach, and ascending sneezelike into his throat, making his nose twitch and his eyes half-close. He felt the laughter coming and couldn’t stop it, and suddenly he was laughing uncontrollably, loudly, gleefully.... “_Dicky!_” He heard his mother’s shocked voice and scrambled to his feet, the laughter dying into indrawn sobs. The shining afternoon whirled about him into cataclysm. “What are you doing down there?” she demanded. She stood on the edge of the lawn above him, her voice quivering with anger. “Dicky, answer me!” “Looking at ants,” he gulped. “I was just--” He crumbled under her reproachful eyes. “I couldn’t help it, Mommie,” he pleaded. “I couldn’t--” “Come here,” she said in the same strained tone. “What if the neighbors heard you! Do you want them to think crazy people live here? Do you?” She broke off with an effort, and took a deep breath. “Come straight in the house now. And just you wait until your father comes home!” The next day Dicky’s father didn’t go to work at the yeast plant. Instead, all three of them went for a ride. They went in a coptercab, which meant downtown, instead of in the car which would have meant a picnic in the country. The night before there had been a consultation which Dicky had overheard only in snatches: “Laughing at _ants!_ I caught him at it.” “...At people next, I suppose!” “But what can we have done wrong?” Since then, happily, Dicky’s fall from grace hadn’t been mentioned, and in the excitement of a ’copter trip he forgot it altogether. The automatic pilot set them down on the roof of a building that loomed large even in a neighborhood of huge buildings. Below were long halls with slick tiles and rubber runners. There were also many doors, and a great many people, dressed entirely in white, and all hurrying. Without knowing quite how it happened, Dicky became separated from his parents in a big room with two men and a lady in white, and a lot of gleaming and mysterious apparatus. He’d been told not to be scared, and he wasn’t--quite. “Sit right here, Dicky. Just hold still, now....”