RUTH MEETS MANY SORTS AND CONDITIONS
The shrill cicadas, people of the pine,
Make their summer lives one ceaseless song.
—_Byron._
“A locust, indeed,” said the newcomer, and Ruth could see plainly that
he was not pleased. “It does seem to me you should know better than
that. Can’t you see I have a _sucking_ beak and not a _biting_ one, like
the grasshopper tribe? Besides, my music isn’t made like theirs. No
faint, fiddly squeak for me, but a fine sound of drums.”
“I think I’ll move on,” said Mr. Grasshopper, and Ruth could see that he
was quite angry. She turned to look at the cricket, but he was far
across the field, fiddling to his mate.
“I wish you wouldn’t go,” she said to the grasshopper. “You have been so
nice to me and I have learned ever so much from you.”
“Oh, I dare say,” was the answer. “More than you will learn from some
people I could mention, but I really must leave you. My mate wants me.”
And a flying leap carried him quite away.
“There, we are rid of the old grandfather,” said the cicada, “and now
what can I do for you?”
“Tell me your real name if it is not locust,” answered Ruth.
“It certainly is not locust. I’ve been called a harvest fly, though I am
not a fly either. I’m a cicada, and nothing else, and I belong to the
order of bugs.”
“And what kind of tera is it?”
“Tera?” repeated the cicada, looking at her with his big eyes. “Oh, yes,
yes, I understand. You mean our scientific name. It is Hemiptera,
meaning half-wings. I know we have some objectionable members, but I
don’t have to associate with them, and I rarely mention their names. I
have a cousin who lives in the ground seventeen years. Think of it! Of
course he is only a grub and doesn’t care for air and sun. I lived there
two years myself, but I was a grub also then. You see my mother put her
eggs in the twig of a tree, and when I came out of one of them I wanted
to get to the ground more than I wanted anything else, so I just crawled
out to the end of the branch and let go. Down I went, over and over, to
the ground, where I soon bored my way in, and began to suck the juices
of the roots about me. I liked it then, but I couldn’t stand it now. Of
course the moles were trying. They were always hungry and we were one of
the things they liked for dinner. One day something seemed to call me to
the world of light, and I came out a changed being—in fact, the
beautiful creature you see before you now. Perhaps you do not know how
much attention we have attracted? In all ages poets have sung of us,
even from the days of Homer. Maybe you will not believe me, but the
early Greeks thought us almost divine, and when Homer wished to say the
nicest things about his orators he compared them to cicadas. A while ago
I told you we were sometimes called harvest flies. We have also been
given the name Lyremen. Shall I tell you why?”
“A story!” cried Ruth, clapping her hands. “Oh, yes, please tell it!”
“Very well. Once upon a time, ages ago, a young Grecian player was
competing for a prize, and so sweet was the music he drew from his lyre
that all who heard it felt he must surely win. But alas! when he was
nearly finished one of his strings snapped, and, with a sad heart, he
thought that all his hope was gone. Not so, however, for a cicada, drawn
from the woods by the sweet sounds, had perched upon the lyre and when
the musician’s trembling fingers touched the broken string it gave forth
a note that was clear and true. Thus again and again the cicada answered
in tones that were sweet and full. When the happy player realized that
the cicada had won the prize for him, he was so filled with gratitude
that he caused a full figure of himself to be carved in marble, and in
his hand a lyre with a cicada perched upon it. Now wouldn’t you be proud
if your family had such a nice story about them?”
“I’m sure it is very nice,” agreed Ruth.
“Yet I’m not one to brag,” added the cicada, “and I am never ashamed to
say I’m a bug. Now if you will come with me to the pond I will show you
some of my cousins. They are very interesting.”
And with a whiz the gauzy-winged fellow darted up into the sunshine, and
Ruth, following him across the meadow, could only hug Belinda in a
rapture of expectation, and whisper in a low voice:
“Aren’t we in luck, Belinda—just the best kind of luck?”
They had gone only a little way, however, when a mole pushed his strong
little snout above the ground.
“Gracious! what a noise,” he said. “If I had had a chance when you were
a baby you wouldn’t be here now to disturb quiet-minded people.”
Ruth jumped. She thought the mole meant he would have eaten her. Then
she laughed. “Of course it was the cicada he was talking to,” but the
cicada didn’t mind.
“I know that very well,” he answered, cheerfully, “but you didn’t get
me. That makes all the difference, and now you can’t.”
“Well, nobody wants you now. You would be mighty dry eating, but when
you were a grub, oh, my! so fat and juicy, like all the other grubs and
slugs and worms. I eat you all. Yet what thanks do I get from man for
doing away with so many of his enemies? Complaints, nothing but
complaints, and just because I raise a few ridges in the ground. I can’t
help that. When I move underground I push the earth before me, and, as
it has to go somewhere, it rises up.”
“What do you push with?” asked Ruth, sitting down in front of the mole.
“With my snout and forepaws,” he answered, “what else? The muscle which
moves my head is very powerful, and you can see how broad my forepaws
are, and, also, that they turn outward. They help to throw back the
earth as I make my way forward. I have ever so many sharp little teeth,
too, and my fur lies smooth in all directions, so it never rumples
and——”
“Do come on,” interrupted the cicada; “that fellow isn’t interesting.”
“That’s so,” said a thin little voice, as an earthworm cautiously lifted
his head from the ground. “Has he gone?” he asked anxiously. “He’d eat
me sooner than wink if he saw me. It is warm and damp this morning, that
is why I am so near the surface. I don’t like dry or cold weather. My
house——”
“Have you a house?”
Ruth had turned upon him in a second, full of questions as usual.
“Certainly I have a house. It is a row of halls, lined with glue from my
own body. The walls are so firm they can’t fall in. Underground is
really a delightful place to live, snug and soft, cool in Summer, warm
in Winter. Lots to see, too. All the creeping, twining roots and stems
reaching out for food, storing it away, or sending it up as sap to the
leaves. The seeds waking up in the Spring, and hosts of meadow and wood
people wrapped in egg and cocoon, who spend their baby days there. Quite
a little world, I assure you. Of course I can’t see any of these things.
I have no eyes.”
“Oh!” said Ruth, “how dreadful!”
“No, it is just as well. If I had eyes I might get earth in them. I go
through the ground so much.”
“But isn’t that awful hard work?” asked Ruth, shutting her eyes to
realize what having no eyes might mean.
“It isn’t hard when one has a nice set of bristles, as I have to help me
along.” The earthworm was one who saw the best side of everything. “I am
made up of more than a hundred rings,” he went on, “and on each are
small stiff hair-like bristles so, though I have neither eyes, ears,
hands, nor feet, I am quite independent. I can move very fast, and the
slime that covers me keeps the earth from sticking to me. Do you know I
am the only jointed animal that has red blood? It is so. I do no harm,
either, to growing things, and I help to build the world. My tunnels let
air into the ground and help to keep it loose. I also bring up rich soil
from below, and lay it on the surface. I also——”
“Well, that’s enough,” interrupted the cicada, moving his wings
impatiently. “I thought you wanted to see _my_ relations?” he added to
Ruth.
“So I do,” answered Ruth. “Where are they?”
“There are a number of them right in this meadow, though you would never
think it, to look at them. They are not at all like me. See that white
froth clinging to those grass stems? A cousin made that. Of the sap of
the plant too. If you look, you will find her in the midst of it. She is
green and speckled and very small. Then there are the tree hoppers, as
funny in shape as brownies, and the leaf hoppers. They are all my
cousins. The aphides too. Of course you know the aphides?”
“I believe they were the things Mrs. Lacewing told me I should learn
about later,” said Ruth, with sudden remembrance.
“Very likely. Mrs. Lacewing’s children should know about them. The
aphides are very bad, though they are so very tiny. But what they lack
in size they make up in numbers. Really there are millions of them. They
are not travellers, either, but stay just where they are hatched, and
suck, suck, suck. In that way they kill many plants, for it is the sap
of the plant, its life juice, which serves them for food. They eat so
much of this that their bodies can’t hold it all, and what they don’t
need is given off as honey dew. The ants like this honey so well that to
get it they take good care of the aphides. But there are some aphides
which do not give off honey dew. Do you see this white stuff on the
alder bushes?”
“Yes. I’ve often seen it before, too. It looks like soft white fringe.”
“Well, it isn’t. It is a lot of aphides, each with a tuft of wool on its
body, and a beak fast stuck in the alder stem.”
They had now reached the pond, which lay smiling in the sunshine.
“It would be so pretty,” said Ruth, throwing herself down on the grass,
“if it wasn’t for the horrid, green, oozy stuff all over it.”
“Horrid, green, oozy stuff?” repeated the cicada. “Child, you don’t know
what you are talking about. That green stuff is made up of tiny green
plants more than you could count. Each has a rootlet hanging down like a
silver thread and leaves almost too small to be called so. They are
green though and they do the mighty work of all green leaves, for,
besides shading the pond world from the hot rays of the sun, they make
for the many inhabitants the life-giving oxygen without which they would
die. And I want to tell you something more: In that duckweed—for what
you call green, oozy stuff is duckweed—there are millions of tiny living
things too small to be seen by the eye except with the aid of a
microscope.”
Ruth looked quite as astonished as the cicada meant she should be.
“You have a great deal to learn, I assure you. Maybe you haven’t thought
of the pond as a world, but just see what a busy place it is.”
Ruth looked and agreed with the cicada. Dragon flies were darting here,
there, and everywhere; frogs, with their heads out of the water, seemed
to be admiring the scenery when they were not swallowing air or whatever
else came in their way; glancing minnows and bright-eyed tadpoles played
amongst the swaying water weeds; even the wrigglers were there, standing
on their heads in their own funny way; and the water striders, skating
after their own queer fashion. Yes, it was a busy place.
A party of whirligig beetles came dashing by, circling, curving,
spinning, and making such a disturbance that a backswimmer lost his
patience and told them to be quiet.
They didn’t like that at all, so they threw about him a very
disagreeable milky fluid which made the backswimmer dive for the bottom
in a hurry.
“That settled him,” said one of the whirligigs. “Hello! friend Skipper
Jack,” he called to a water strider, “what are you doing?”
“Skating, of course,” answered the water strider. “There, they are
gone,” he added, to the cicada, “and I am glad of it. They are
nuisances.”
“You are right,” agreed the cicada.
“I am glad they don’t belong to our order.”
“Don’t they?” asked Ruth. “I think they are awfully funny.”
“Funny or not, they are beetles,” answered the water strider. “You had
better use your eyes. Do you know why I can skate and not get my feet
wet? No, of course you don’t, and yet it is as plain as the nose on your
face. I have a coat of hairs on the under side of my body. That’s why. I
spend my time on the surface of the water, for my dinner is right here.
Plenty of gnats, insect eggs, and other eatables. Then if I wish I can
spring up in the air for the things that fly. My Winters I spend under
water, but for other seasons give me the surface.”
“And I like the bottom best,” said a water boatman, showing himself
quite suddenly, his air-covered body glittering like silver armour.
“Another cousin,” whispered the cicada in Ruth’s ear. “He is called the
water cicada, as well as water boatman.”
“He looks more like a boat than he does like you,” said Ruth.
“My body is boat-shaped,” spoke up the boatman; “and see my hind legs;
they really are like oars, aren’t they?”
“I am wondering what brought you to the surface,” said the cicada.
“Why, I let go my hold on that old water weed, and you know the air that
covers my body makes it lighter than the water and unless I cling to
something I naturally rise. It is inconvenient, for I do not need to
come to the surface for air. I can breathe the same air over and over,
because I know how to purify it.”
“How do you do it?” asked Ruth. Surely these insects were wonderfully
clever.
“Oh, I simply hang to something with my front legs, while I move my back
ones just as I do in swimming, and that makes a current of water pass
over my coat of air and purify it. That fellow swimming on his back over
there is obliged to come to the surface every little while. He carries
air down in a bubble under his wings.”
“Do you mean me?” asked the backswimmer, making a sudden leap in the
air, and flying away.
“Gracious!” cried Ruth in surprise. “I didn’t know he could fly.”
“There’s a good deal you don’t know,” replied the water boatman, a
remark Ruth had heard before. “I can fly too,” and he also spread his
wings and was off.
“Well,” said the cicada, “I guess we might as well be off too. There
seems to be no one in sight to interest us.”
“What about cousin Belostoma?” asked a sort of muffled voice, as a great
pair of bulging eyes showed themselves above the water, and out came the
giant water bug as big as life.
“I’ve just had my dinner,” he said. “It really is funny to see how
everything hides when Belostoma shows his face. My wife is the only one
who doesn’t seem to be afraid of me and she—well, she’s a terror and no
mistake.”
“Why, what’s the matter now?” asked the cicada.
“And what has happened to your back?” added Ruth, with eager curiosity.
“My wife’s happened, that’s what,” answered Belostoma in a doleful tone.
“She laid her eggs a while ago and glued every blessed one to my back.
It is nothing to laugh at either. There’s no joke in being a walking
incubator. Well, I must be going now. It is dinner time.”
“I thought you just had your dinner,” said Ruth.
“Yes, but it’s time again. It is always time. How silly you are.”
“I must go too,” said the cicada, “but it isn’t dinner that calls me. I
feel sure my mate is longing for some music and I’m off to give her a
bit. See you later.”
And, spreading his wings, the cicada flew away, beating his drums as he
went.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]