“‘Ah, my Tithonus,’ whispered Aurora, ‘I love you too well to see you thus unhappy. No more shall you be sad or bend beneath an old man’s weakness, but, as a child of the meadow, happy and free, you shall sing and dance through the golden hours.’ In that moment Tithonus became a grasshopper, and ever since then his descendants have danced and sung in the sunshine. That’s the end of the story. I might have made it twice as long, but Summer is so short, and I want to dance.” “It was a very nice story,” said Ruth, “but do you really dance?” “Of course, our kind of dancing.” “But don’t you do lots of other things too?” “Yes; we give concerts, and we eat. We are hatched with big appetites, and a strong pair of jaws, and we start right in to use them on the tender grasses around us. We only follow our instincts, though men call it doing damage. You eat, don’t you?” “Why, yes, but I don’t eat grass, you know.” “Because it isn’t your food. You see it’s this way: In the kingdom of nature all creatures have a certain work to do, and each is exactly fitted for its place, for all are governed by laws more wonderful than any man has made. Not that I wish to speak lightly of man, he is good enough in his place, but he is apt to think himself the whole thing, and he isn’t. Maybe he doesn’t know that for every human creature on earth there are millions of plants and animals.” “Oh,” said Ruth, “really and truly?” “Really and truly. You couldn’t begin to count them, and do you know, if the earth was to grow quite bare, with only one living plant left on it, the seeds from that one plant could make it green again in a very few years. But if certain insects were left without other creatures to eat and keep them down, the poor old earth would soon be bare once more. So you see there must be laws to fix all these things. Nature balances one set of creatures against the other, so there will not be too many of any kind.” Ruth had listened in open-eyed astonishment. Surely this was a very wise grasshopper. “You know a great deal,” she managed to say at last. “Yes, I do,” was the answer. “I heard two men say the things I’ve just told you. They were walking across this meadow, and I listened and remembered. You see, I believe in learning even from men. But do listen to the concert—we are right in the middle of it.” [Illustration: THE WISE GRASSHOPPER] They certainly _were_ in the middle of it. The zip, zip, zip, zee-e-ee-e of the meadow grasshoppers seemed to come from every part of the sunny field, while the shorthorns, or flying locusts, were gently fiddling under the grass blades, their wing covers serving for strings, and their thighs as fiddle bows, and the field crickets, not to be outdone, were scraping away with the finely notched veins of the fore wings upon their hind wings. The longhorns were also there, some in green, others in brown or gray, all drumming away on the drum heads set in their fore wings.