RUTH GOES TO A CONCERT
Oh, sweet and tiny cousins that belong,
One to the fields, the other to the hearth,
Both have your sunshine.
—_Leigh Hunt._
Ruth and Belinda were crossing the meadow, when a big grasshopper made a
flying leap, and landed on Belinda’s head.
“Do excuse me,” he said; “I missed my aim. No one hurt, I hope, or
frightened?”
“Oh, no,” answered Ruth. “Belinda is real sensible; she isn’t afraid of
anything, and I am just as glad—as _glad_—to see you. Maybe you will——”
Ruth hesitated, hoping he would know what she meant to say. She was sure
he could tell her a great many things, if only he would. He was so
polite and nice; besides, he looked very wise.
“I suppose you’re going to the concert,” said Mr. Grasshopper, after
waiting a second for Ruth to finish her sentence.
“Concert?” she repeated, opening her eyes wide. “What concert?”
“Why the Straightwings’ Concert. They give one every sunny day in
Summer. Didn’t you know that? Dear me, where were you hatched and where
have you been living since? Well, why do you stare at me so? Don’t you
like my looks?”
“Oh, yes,” Ruth hastened to answer. “You look very nice—something like a
little old man.”
“I’ve heard that before, and there’s a story about it. Shall I tell it?”
“Yes, please; I just love stories.”
“Very well. Once upon a time, long, long ago, there lived in Greece a
beautiful young man named Tithonus. Now it chanced that Tithonus loved
Aurora, the Goddess of the Dawn.”
“Greece?” said Ruth. “Why, that’s where Arachna lived, the one who
turned into a spider, you know?”
“Do you want to hear my story or don’t you?” asked Mr. Grasshopper,
sharply.
“I do want to hear it. I really do.”
“Very well, then, don’t interrupt me again. As I was saying, Tithonus
loved Aurora, and every morning he would lie in the meadow and wait for
her coming. Then the fair goddess would give him her sweetest smiles.
But one day Tithonus grew pale and ill, and all the love of Aurora could
not make him well again. ‘Alas!’ he cried, ‘I am mortal, and I must
die.’ ‘Nay,’ answered Aurora, ‘you shall not die, for I will win for you
the gift of the gods.’ And, speeding to the mighty Jupiter, she begged
that Tithonus might be as a god, and live forever. So for a while they
were happy together, but as the years passed Tithonus grew old and bent,
for Aurora had forgotten to ask that he might always be young. Grieving
much, Tithonus lay under the shadow of the trees and sighed through the
long days.”
“‘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.
“You would hear katydid too,” said Mr. Grasshopper, “only he refuses to
sing in the day. He hides under the leaves of the trees while it is
light, and comes out at night. If you think _me_ wise, I don’t know what
you would say of him. He is such a solemn-looking chap, always dressed
in green, and his wing covers are like leaves. You might think him
afraid if you saw him wave his long antennæ, but he isn’t. He is
curious, that’s all. It is a high sort of curiosity, too, like mine—a
wish to learn. I suppose you know we don’t make our music with our
mouths?” he asked suddenly. “Well, that is something,” he added, as Ruth
nodded “Yes.”
“I sing with the upper part of my wing covers, but my cousins, the
shorthorns, sing with their hind legs. Why do you laugh? Aren’t legs as
good to sing with as anything else?”
“I—I suppose so,” said Ruth. “It sounds funny, because I am not used to
that kind of singing.”
“Just it. Now I shall tell you a few more facts about us. We belong to
the order of the Straightwings, or the Orthoptera, as the wise men call
it.”
“Will you please tell me what that means?” asked Ruth. “Do all insects
belong to something ending in tera? Most everything I have talked to
does except toads and spiders.”
“And they are not insects,” said Mr. Grasshopper. “Not even the spiders.
The word insect means cut into parts, and all insects have three parts,
a head, and behind that the thorax or chest, and the abdomen. Then, too,
they always have six jointed legs. Now maybe you have noticed that
spiders are not built on this plan? There are only two parts of them.
The head and thorax are in one. It is called the cephalothorax. I’d feel
dreadfully carrying such a thing around with me, but the spiders do not
seem to mind it. Their other part is their abdomen. I heard a little boy
say it was like a squashy bag; and between ourselves that is about what
it is. Of course you know that spiders have eight legs and that alone
would settle the question. True insects never have but six. Now as to
the orders: All insects are divided into groups, and it is something
about the wings which gives them their names. That is why they all end
in ptera, because ptera comes from pteron, a word which means wing. It
isn’t an English word, you know, but is taken from a language called
Greek.”
Ruth listened very patiently. If she had heard all this in school it
would have seemed very dry, but when a grasshopper is telling you things
it is of course quite different.
“But I am sure I can never remember it all,” she said.
“Ah, yes, you can. Remembering is easy if you only practise it.”
“Why, that’s like the White Queen,” cried Ruth. “She practised believing
things till she could believe six impossible things at once, before
breakfast.”
“I don’t know the person,” said the grasshopper.
“She lived in the Looking Glass Country,” began Ruth, but Mr.
Grasshopper was not listening.
“You have met the Diptera, or Two Wings,” he said. “That’s easy. Then
you’ve met the Neuroptera, or Nerve Wings. That’s easy too. And now you
have met the Orthoptera, or Straightwings, meaning me, and if I’m not
easy, I should like to know who is. You see our wings are——”
“Wings?” said Ruth in surprise.
“Of course. Look here,” and opening his straight wing covers, Mr.
Grasshopper showed as nice a pair of wings as one could wish to possess.
“Not all of us have wings,” he added, folding his own away, “but those
of us who have not live under stones. Our order includes graspers,
walkers, runners, and jumpers. Not all are musicians. The graspers live
only in hot countries. Maybe you have seen the picture of one of
them—the praying mantis he is called, just because he holds up his front
legs as if he were praying. But it isn’t prayers he is saying. He is
waiting for some insect to come near enough so he may grab and eat it.
That will do for him. Next come the walkers. The walking stick is one,
and he isn’t a good walker either, but the stick part of the name fits
him. He is dreadfully thin. There is one on that twig now, and he looks
so much like the twig you can scarcely tell which is which.”
“Why, so he does,” said Ruth, poking her finger at the twig Mr.
Grasshopper pointed out. “Isn’t he funny?”
“Indeed,” grumbled the walking stick. “Maybe you think it polite to come
staring at a fellow, and sticking your finger at him, and then call him
funny, but I don’t. I want to look like a twig. That’s why I am holding
myself so stiff. I have a cousin in the Tropics who has wings just like
leaves.”
“Yes,” added the grasshopper, “and his wife is so careless she just
drops her eggs from the tree to the ground and never cares how they
fall.”
“Well, if that suits her no one else need object,” snapped the walking
stick. “I believe in each one minding his own business.”
“An excellent idea,” said Mr. Grasshopper. “Now let me see, where was I?
Oh! the runners; but you’ll excuse me, I will not speak of them at all.
They include croton bugs and cock roaches, and it is quite enough to
mention their names. With the jumpers it is different. They are the most
important members of the order. I’m a jumper, I am also a true
grasshopper. You can tell that by my long slender antennæ, longer than
my body. For that reason I am called a longhorn, but my antennæ are
really not horns.”
“I don’t see how any one _could_ call them horns,” said Ruth.
“No more do I, but some people have queer ideas about things. Well, I
don’t care much. There is my mate over there. Do you notice the
sword-shaped ovipositor at the end of her body? She uses it to make
holes in the ground and also to lay her eggs in the hole after it is
finished. Yes, she is very careful. Her eggs stay there all Winter, and
hatch in the Spring, not into grubs or caterpillars, or anything of that
sort. They will be grasshoppers, small, it is true, and without wings,
but true grasshoppers, which need only to grow and change their skins to
be just like us. And I’m sure we have nothing to be ashamed of. We have
plenty of eyes, six legs, and ears on our forelegs, not like you people
who have queer things on the sides of your heads. Such a place for
hearing! but every one to his taste. Well, to go on, we have wing
covers, and lovely wings under them, a head full of lips and jaws, and a
jump that _is_ a jump. What more could one wish? Do you know what our
family name is?”
Ruth didn’t know they had a family name, so of course she could not say
what it was.
“It is Locustidae,” said Mr. Grasshopper, answering his own question.
“Funny too, for there isn’t a locust among us. Locusts are the
shorthorned grasshoppers—that is, their antennæ are shorter than ours.
They are cousins, but we are not proud of them. They are not very good.”
“No one is asking you to be proud,” said a grasshopper, jumping from a
nearby grass blade. She had a plump gray and green body, red legs, and
brown wings, with a broad lemon-yellow band.
“What’s the matter with me?” she demanded. “I guess you don’t know what
you are talking about. It’s the Western fellow that is so bad. We
Eastern locusts are different.”
“Well, I suppose you are,” agreed the longhorn. “I know the Western
locusts travel in swarms and eat every green thing in sight. They are
called the hateful grasshoppers.”
“No one can say that our family has ever been called hateful or anything
like it,” said a little cricket with a merry chirp. “We are considered
very cheery company, and one of the sweetest stories ever written was
about our English cousin, the house cricket.”
“I am sure you mean ‘The Cricket on the Hearth,’” said Ruth. “It is a
lovely story, and I think crickets are just dear. Are you a house
cricket too?”
“No, I belong to the fields, and I sing all day. Sometimes I go into the
house when Winter comes and sing by the fire at night, but my real home
is in the earth. I dig a hole in a sunny spot and Mrs. Cricket lays her
eggs at the bottom, and fastens them to the ground with a kind of glue.
Sometimes there are three hundred of them, and you can imagine what a
lively family they are when they hatch.”
“I should like to see them,” said Ruth, for it was quite impossible for
her to imagine so many baby crickets together.
“Well, it is a sight, I assure you,” answered the little cricket. “Did
you ever come across my cousin the mole cricket? She is very large and
quite clever. She makes a wonderful home with many halls around her
nest. She is always on guard too so that no one may touch her precious
eggs. Then I have another cousin, who doesn’t dress in brown like me,
but is all white. He lives on trees and shrubs and doesn’t eat leaves
and grass as we do. He prefers aphides. You can hear him making music on
Summer evenings. We crickets seldom fly. We——”
The sentence was not finished, for just then a long droning note grew on
the air, increasing in volume, until it rose above the meadow chorus.
“Oh!” cried Ruth, spying a creature with great bulging eyes and
beautiful, transparent wings, glittering with rainbow tints, “There’s a
locust! Isn’t he beautiful, Belinda? Maybe he will tell us some things.
Oh, Belinda, aren’t we in luck?”
[Illustration]
[Illustration]