We rested our chins on our hands and lay still, looking down over the
chaparral-covered hillside and far out across the hazy valley. On the
distant bay were little white specks, small schooners that carry wood
and tan-bark and hay from the bay towns to San Francisco; and across
the blue bay lifted the bare, brown mountains of the Coast Range, with
always that gleaming white spot of the Observatory a-tiptop of the
highest peak. It was a soft, languid, lazy day. Such a peace-giving,
relaxing, healing day! And we were so enveloped by it, Mary and I,
that we simply lay still and happy, with hardly a word. I had, of
course, intended to give Mary an informing lecture about how the ugly,
horrid ant-lion finally stops preying on ants and rolls himself up in
a neat little silk-and-sand ball, and changes into a beautiful,
slender-bodied, gauzy-winged creature without any resemblance at all
to its earlier incarnation. But I didn't. It was too fine a day to
spoil with informing lectures.
And so Mary and I lay still and happy. Finally it was time to go. As
we went down the road we passed again the place of the pits, and Mary
looked once more at the neat little craters with their patient waiting
jaws at the bottom.
"I wonder," she said, musingly, "if Mr. Kipling ever saw an ant-lion
pit."
"I wonder," said I.
[Illustration: ARGIOPE OF THE SILVER SHIELD]