Now I want the smallest of you little children to hold up her hand.
How small it is compared with your body! Now let us see the little
finger on that hand,--it is smaller still; and now look at the nail on
that finger: the brothers and sisters of one of these families were
altogether about as large as that tiny nail. Their mamma was a wasp,
with light, gauzy wings and a strong body with a long sting on the end
of it, about the length of a needle. With this little sting or saw, as
it really was, she had bored many holes in the wood when it was still
a green tree, and at the bottom of each hole she had laid a tiny egg.
There it lay for a long time, all white and still, until one day it
cracked open, and out came a funny little white grub, with six short
white feet, and black jaws very strong and large for such a tiny
thing. This little creature had never had anything to eat, and as it
was very hungry indeed, it fell to eating--what do you think? Wood--
its own house! You wouldn't like a stick of wood for your breakfast, I
know, but the wasp-mamma knew what her little grub-children would
want, so she put them in just the right place; for they couldn't have
eaten anything else. And the hungry little grubs ate and ate and ate
as long as they could, pushing away from the hole the part they did
not want, and this fell upon the ground as the strange yellow powder
the children found in the wood-yard, every spring.

And so, while the little girls were placing away in the sunshine the
little grubs were eating away in the wood, until at last, one day,
they grew satisfied, and one after another went to sleep. There they
lay in their dark homes, fast asleep, through long weeks, while the
snow was melting and the grass coming up, and the birds and bees
beginning their summer work again; until one day these lazy little
creatures, that had never done anything in their lives but eat and
sleep, woke up and began to stretch themselves. But what had happened