THE SEVEN LITTLE BASKETS. 37

when they were brought from their own ant-hill they were too
young to notice anything. The conquerors carried the stolen
baby ants in their mouths and put them into nurseries where
they would be taken care of by the grown-up slave ants already
in the nest, carried off sometime before, to be brought up as
servants; whose work it was to put food into their masters’
mouths and help in all the work except fighting. The baby
ants were at once carried upstairs by these, washed and taken
care of.

English ants had no slaves; but the soldier could see that
they took quite as much care of their own children, though they
were so much smaller themselves than the foreign ants. They
were busy, when the wooden soldier looked in, carrying them
into an upper room, because that morning there had been a
shower, and the nurse ants thought that it might be damp for
their charges down below; so these careful little people had
carried them all up into a_ higher
story, and would be sure to carry
them down again when they found the
sunbeams too hot. It was a pleasant
peep-show for the soldier to watch,
with his one eye pressed close to the “#
Crackin) Ile snoticedathatmine smunse=
maid ants licked the eggs all over by
way of washing them; this was all
they had to do for the mere eggs, but some which were
hatched had to be carefully fed as well. On what? Ah!
now the soldier saw something quite as strange as he could
have seen in any foreign parts. He saw that these little
yellowish dots of creatures actually kept insects smaller than
themselves, just as we keep cows, even rearing them inside their
own nest from eggs which they hunted for and found, that they