"Until I saw these chicks, Redwood, I don't think I _began_ to
realise--anything--of the possibilities of what we were making. It's
only beginning to dawn upon me ... the possible consequences...."

And even then, you know, Mr. Bensington was far from any conception of
the mine that little train would fire.


IV.

That happened early in June. For some weeks Bensington was kept from
revisiting the Experimental Farm by a severe imaginary catarrh, and one
necessary flying visit was made by Redwood. He returned an even more
anxious-looking parent than he had gone. Altogether there were seven
weeks of steady, uninterrupted growth....

And then the Wasps began their career.

It was late in July and nearly a week before the hens escaped from
Hickleybrow that the first of the big wasps was killed. The report of it
appeared in several papers, but I do not know whether the news reached
Mr. Bensington, much less whether he connected it with the general
laxity of method that prevailed in the Experimental Farm.

There can be but little doubt now, that while Mr. Skinner was plying Mr.
Bensington's chicks with Herakleophorbia IV, a number of wasps were just
as industriously--perhaps more industriously--carrying quantities of the
same paste to their early summer broods in the sand-banks beyond the
adjacent pine-woods. And there can be no dispute whatever that these
early broods found just as much growth and benefit in the substance as