She left him in a hurry, and thereafter resumed her endless searching
along the hedge-bank. A dozen times she vanished into a hole, and,
after a minute or so, came out again with the air of one dissatisfied.
Half-a-dozen times she came out tail first, buzzing warnings and very
angry, at the invitation of a bumble-bee queen, a big, hook-jawed,
carnivorous beetle in shining mail, and so forth, but she never lost
her head.

Finally, she came to a mole-hole that suited her. The other burrows
had all turned out to be field-mouse holes, leading ultimately into a
main tunnel that ran the whole length of the hedge apparently, and was
a public way for all the little whiskered ones. But this tunnel, bored
by the miner mole, ran nowhither, having caved in not far from the
entrance, and was very sound of construction, with a nice dry slope.
She selected a wide spot where the tunnel branched, each branch forming
a _cul-de-sac_. Here she slew swiftly several suspicious-looking
little tawny beetles and one field-cricket, who put up a rare good
fight for it, found loafing about the place.

It pleased the queen that here, in this spot, she would found her a
city. But first she must, as it were, take the latitude and the
longitude of this her stronghold to be. She must know where her city
was, must make absolutely dead sure, certain, of finding it again when
she went out. Otherwise, if she lost it--well, there would be an end
to it before it had begun, so to speak. For this purpose, therefore,
she rose slowly, humming to herself some royal incantation--rose, upon
a gradually widening corkscrew spiral, into the air.

She was, in point of fact, surveying the district round her capital to
be, marking each point--bush, stone, grass-tuft, tree-trunk,