afternoon while having tea on the verandah, Noticing a peculiar dark patch near the coping, I proceeded to investigate. The dark patch turned out to be a writhing, squirming, strug-ling swarm of tiny. ants, Examining them Under a magnifying glass, T could see the little creatures massed in a death struggle that would make the recent battle for Hsuchow on. the Lung-Hal Railway look ike a Sunday School picnic. "There they were piled up to a depth of at least half an inch, each of the many tens of thousands of combatants busily chewing up the abdomen or thorax of another or sawing off a leg or an antenna, the while its own body was} being dismembered—no quarter sought or given, prisoners, just slaughter. The thickest part of the fight covered about eight square inches of the brief coping, but the battlefield spread much further in every direction, where could be seen groups of two, three or four ants with their jaws locked on some helpless victim from the opposite side. It was impossible, however, for me to distinguish between the two opposing armies, for all the ants were of the same species, but it was perfectly clear that they represented two different colonies. because in either direction from the scene of conflict there was a steady stream of ants passing to and from a nest in a crack in the coping. Those moving away from the battlefield all carried the remains of dead warriors in their jaws, those moving toward it seemingly eager for the fray. Evidently tension between the two coles of ants had reached breaking paint, probeely as a result of border Incidents," kidnappings, or even territorial aggression. <4 so they had taken a leaf out of humenitv" bock and decided to settle the dispute in the e-honoured method customary amongst men, But, as already suggested, it is very diseripinting after all that we have been ied to pect of the ant with its marvellously developed tod promise has been fulthed. October when aeroplanes artillery was barking and roaring to the north and west of us and sndanon, the ground shook with the heavy detonation of bombs dropping on Chinese villages and farmsteads just beyond the railway Tine not over haifa mile away. Things were fat their blackest and there seemed no hope for any of us in Shanghai. It was then that the promise was made, a promise that all the horror And destruction should pass and be forgotten, fand that the "scorched earth" of China should once more bring forth flowers and fruit in abundance. My wife and I were walking in our garden in the twilight of a nerve-rackitz Gay, trying to recover some of that serenity of soul which alone can see one through such period of crises as we all experienced last year. Suddenly I noticed a white patch shining through the gloaming, and, approaching to see what It was, discovered a magnificent gardenia bloom. "Several weeks had passed since the shrub on which it grew had ceased blooming. It had no conceivable right to be there, yet there it) was in all its white purity and loveliness, the most perfect blossom of its kind Thad ever seen. With the boom of artillery and the rattle of machine-gun fire in my cars, It nevertheless seemed.to promise that all would yet be well, that, just as it was there Spreading its fragrance on the evening air, so. would the fair land of China once more "blossom as the rose." Turning to my wife, I read the message of the beautiful waxy who flower, a message of hope to revive our waning courage and our belief in the eternal rightness fof things and the ultimate triumph of good over evil All through the days and weeks and months that have followed, that white blossom has shone like a star through the darkness of despair—a promise for the future. Today, on the very same shrub and at almost the identical spot, T found, as T walked in my garden in the cool of the morning, a glorious white gardenia bloom, the first of the season, and the exact counterpart of the bloom that appeared so late Fast October. It said, "My promise has been fulfilled; no matter how evil is man, no matter how horrible the sears he makes on the face of the earth, Mother Nature obliterates his evil deeds and covers up the scars he makes with verdure and sweetness. Again I promise, all will yet be well "=a. oe es, There are few members of the lower orders of animal life more universally disliked than spiders, yet spiders are amongst the most interesting of all the Arthropods, or animals with Jointed legs. Their diversity of form and amazing variation in habits make them so, The different shifts for a living to which they resort are astonishing. Some spread deadly snares in the form of webs, others Hie in wait for their prey, cunningly hidden, while yet others, the well-spiders, literally run down their quarry like their hame-sake. On my verandah on warm sunny days may be seen a kind of spider which exactly resembles fan ant. So close is the resemblance that with-Out the use of a magnifying glass it is almost Impossible to distinguish it from the ants that frequent the same spots in which it chooses to hunt its prey. Unlike most spiders, "whose bodies have a hairy br velvety appearance, this species has a shiny black or dark brown body, as in most ants, while its general shape is the same as that of the latter. Spiders have eight Tegs and no antennae. Ants, on the other liliand, have only six legs, but they usually have a pair of rather long antennae, which they wave about as they run, using them as sense organs. The more closely to resemble the ant, the spider under discussion usually runs on six legs while it holds the foremost pair in the air, waving them about in exactly the same way that the ant waves ils antennae, It may well be asked, what advantage does the spider gain by this mimicry of the ant? The answer lies in the respective habits of the two crea tures. While the ant is mainly a scavenger, the spider is a hunter, preying upon active fying insects, which are by no means oaty to catch.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.