wood. Cut wood appeared to be her desire, and that oak; at least, she
put behind her a deal board lying half-overgrown, after one careful
professional inspection.

Her way was through a perilous world, beset by a thousand foes, mostly
in the nature of traps and lines and barbed-wire entanglements set by
spiders. As a rule you didn't see these last at all--nor did she; but
her yellow-and-black badge usually won her a way of respect--and
hate--and she cut or struggled herself clear of such web-lines as her
feelers failed to spot in time.

At last she found some real oak rails, and set to work upon them at
once, planing with her sharp shear-jaws. A tiger-beetle, gaudy and
hungry-eyed, sought to pounce upon her in this task. He was
long-legged, and keen, and lean, and very swift; but she shot aloft
just in time; and when she came down again, with a z-zzzzp, as quickly
as she went up, sting first, he had wisely dodged into a cranny, where
he defied her with open and jagged jaws.

Again getting to work, she planed off a pellet of good sound wood--it
looked like a nail-scrape, the mark she made--and masticating it and
moistening it with saliva, whirred back like a homing aeroplane to her
city in the making.

There was a whir and a buzz as she passed through the portals of her
main gate from the light of day, and she reappeared again, backing out,
"looking daggers," as we say, and brandishing her poisoned dart--her
sting, if you insist, on the end of her tail--in the air. But she
still hung on to her pellet.