Something exciting was going on. Ruth could not tell just what it was at first. She could only watch and wonder. Then her eyes grew large and bright. Surely some fairy’s wand had touched the old orchard, for suddenly it seemed alive with beetles—big beetles and little beetles; beetles in sober colourings, and beetles gleaming with all the tints of the rainbow. Ruth had never dreamed that there could be so many of them or that they were so beautiful. The gorgeously coloured, graceful tigers attracted her first, though she didn’t know their name. “Oh,” she cried, “how lovely!” “And how strange,” added a voice just above her head, “how very strange, their children should be so homely.” “What’s that?” asked one of the tigers, a metallic green fellow, with purple lights, and two pale yellow dots on the edge of each wing cover. “Our children not so beautiful as we are, did you say? Of course, they are not; a fat grub couldn’t be, you know. But let me tell you, there are few things as smart as a tiger beetle baby. I say,” he added, looking full at Ruth, “have you ever seen the hole he digs? It is often a foot deep, while he is less than an inch long. He has only his jaws and fore legs to work with too. Yet he piles the earth on his flat head as if it were the easiest thing in the world, and then, climbing to the top, he throws it off, and is ready for another load.” “I suppose he digs a hole to catch things,” said Ruth, “like the ant lion, and does he stay at the bottom and——” “No, he doesn’t stay at the bottom. He watches near the top of his hole for his dinner, hanging on by a pair of hooks which grow out of a hump on his back. He always goes to the bottom to eat his dinner, though; he seems to like privacy. Yes, we are a fierce family from the beginning, for we grown tigers can catch our prey either running or flying, and we usually manage to get it, too. But, then, farmers need not complain of us, for we never eat plants, and that is more than can be said of many here.” “Such taste,” said a cloaked, knotty horn, holding herself in a position that showed off her changeable blue and green dress, and her short yellow cape. But the tiger did not answer. He was off after his dinner. Several tree borers, however, nodded their heads in agreement. “I believe in a vegetable diet myself,” said Mrs. Sawyer, who wore as usual her dress of brown and gray. “It is just such people as the tigers who make things like that necessary in a respectable meeting,” and as she spoke she waved her very long antennæ toward a big sign which read: “THE AUDIENCE ARE REQUESTED NOT TO EAT EACH OTHER DURING THE MEETING” “I am glad to say I am not one of that kind. I wonder if any one of you know why the members of our family are called sawyers. Perhaps I had better tell you: It is because our children saw into the trunks of evergreen trees, and sometimes they make holes large enough to kill the trees. Smart, isn’t it, for a baby?”