My Studio Neighbors | Page 5

is passed. The second stage is entered into within a few hours,
and is passed within a silken cocoon, with which the white grub now
surrounds itself, and with which, transformed to a pupa, it bides its time
for about three weeks, as I now recall, when--third stage--out pops the
mud cork, and the perfect wasp appears at the opening of the cell. I
have shown sections of one of my brushes in the three stages.
This interesting little hornet is a common summer species, known as
the solitary hornet--one of them--Odynerus flavipes. The insect is about
a half-inch in length, and to the careless observer might suggest a

yellow-jacket, though the yellow is here confined to two triangular
spots on the front of the thorax and three bands upon the abdomen.
Like the wren among birds, it is fond of building in holes, and will
generally obtain them ready-made if possible. Burroughs has said of
the wren that it "will build in anything that has a hole in it, from an old
boot to a bombshell." In similar whim our little solitary hornet has been
known to favor nail-holes, hollow reeds, straws, the barrels of a pistol,
holes in kegs, worm-holes in wood, and spools, to which we may now
add bamboo brushes.
[Illustration]
Ovid declared and the ancient Greeks believed that hornets were the
direct progeny of the snorting war-horse. The phrase "mad as a hornet"
has become a proverb. Think, then, of a brush loaded and tipped with
this martial spirit of Vespa, this cavorting afflatus, this testy animus!
There is more than one pessimistic "goose-quill," of course, "mightier
than the sword," which, it occurs to me in my now charitable mood,
might have been thus surreptitiously voudooed by the war-like hornet,
and the plug never removed.

THE CUCKOOS & THE OUTWITTED COW-BIRD
[Illustration]
How has that "blessed bird" and "sweet messenger of spring," the
"cuckoo," imposed upon the poetic sensibilities of its native land!
And what is this cuckoo which has thus bewitched all the poets? What
is the personality behind that "wandering voice?" What the
distinguishing trait which has made this wily attendant on the spring
notorious from the times of Aristotle and Pliny? Think of "following
the cuckoo," as Logan longed to do, in its "annual visit around the
globe," a voluntary witness and accessory to the blighting curse of its
vagrant, almost unnatural life! No, my indiscriminate bards; on this
occasion we must part company. I cannot "follow" your cuckoo--except

with a gun, forsooth--nor welcome your "darling of the spring," even
though he were never so captivating as a songster.
[Illustration]
The song and the singer are here identical and inseparable, to my
prosaic and rational senses; for does not that "blithe new-comer," as
Tennyson says, "tell his name to all the hills"--"Cuckoo! Cuckoo!"
The poet of romance is prompted to draw on his imagination for his
facts, but the poet of nature must first of all be true, and incidentally as
beautiful and good as may be; and a half-truth or a truth with a
reservation may be as dangerous as falsehood. The poet who should so
paint the velvety beauty of a rattlesnake as to make you long to coddle
it would hardly be considered a safe character to be at large. Likewise
an ode to the nettle, or to the autumn splendor of the poison-sumac,
which ignored its venom would scarcely be a wise botanical guide for
indiscriminate circulation among the innocents. Think, then, of a poetic
eulogium on a bird of which the observant Gilbert could have written:
"This proceeding of the cuckoo, of dropping its eggs as it were by
chance, is such a monstrous outrage on maternal affection, one of the
first great dictates of nature, and such a violence on instinct, that had it
only been related of a bird in the Brazils or Peru, it would never have
merited our belief.... She is hardened against her young ones as though
they were not hers.... 'Because God hath deprived her of wisdom,
neither hath He imparted to her understanding.'"
America is spared the infliction of this notorious "cuckoo." Its nearest
congeners, our yellow-billed and black-billed cuckoos, while
suggesting their foreign ally in shape and somewhat in song, have
mended their ways, and though it is true they make a bad mess of it,
they at least try to build their own nest, and rear their own young with
tender solicitude. The nest is usually so sparse and flimsy an affair that
you can see through its coarse mesh of sticks from below, the
fledglings lying as on a grid-iron or toaster; and it is, moreover,
occasionally so much higher in the centre than at the sides that the
chicks tumble out of bed and perish. Still, it