tween Miss Tarrant and Miss Milner. Philippa's look was wonderful, a smile flung down from her heights into the old dusty lists of sex to challenge that young Innocence. Miss Milner's look was even more wonderful than Philippa's; grave and abstracted, it left Philippa's smile lying where she had flung it; she wasn't going, it said, to take that up. And yet a duel went on between them, a duel conducted with perfect propriety on either side. It lasted about half an hour. Philippa's manner said plainly to Miss Milner: "My child, you have got hold of something that isn't good for you, something that doesn't belong to you, something that you are not old enough or clever enough to keep, something that you will not be permitted to keep. You had better drop it." Miss Milner's manner said still more plainly to Philippa, "I don't know what you're driving at, but you don't suppose I take you seriously, do you?" It said nothing at all about Laurence Furnival. That was where Miss Milner's manner scored. In short, it was a very pretty duel, and it ended in Miss Milner's refusing to accompany Furnival to the Amberley woods and in Philippa's carrying him off bodily (Straker noted that she scored a point there, or seemed to score). As they went Miss Milner was seen to smile, subtly, for all her innocence. She lent herself with great sweetness to Brocklebank's desire to show her his prize roses. Straker was left alone with Fanny. Fanny was extremely agitated by the sight of Furnival's capture. "Jimmy," she said, "haven't I been good to you? Haven't I been an angel? Haven't I done every mortal thing I could for you?" He admitted that she had. "Well, then, now you've got to do something for me. You've got to look after Philippa. Don't let her get at him." "No fear." But Fanny insisted that he had seen Philippa carrying Furnival off under Molly Milner's innocent nose, and that her manner of appropriating him too vividly recalled the evening of her arrival two years ago, when he would remember what had happened to poor Nora's nose. "She took him from Nora." "Don't talk to me about your highest moral anything. I know what it was." 66 Besides, she didn't take him from Nora," she went on, ignoring her previous line of argument. "He took himself. He was getting tired of her." "Well," said Straker, "he isn't tired of Miss Milner." "She's taken him off there," said Fanny. She nodded gloomily toward the Amberley woods. Straker smiled. He was looking westward over the shining fields where he had once walked with Philippa. Already they were returning. Furnival had not allowed himself to be taken very far. As they approached, Straker saw that Philippa was pouring herself out at Furnival and that Furnival was not absorbing any of it; he was absorbed in his Idea. Idea had made him absolutely impervious to Philippa. All this Straker saw. His He made himself very attentive to Miss Tarrant that evening, and after dinner, at her request, he walked with her on the terrace. Over the low wall they could see Furnival in the rosegarden with Miss Milner. They saw him give her a rose, which the young girl pinned in the bosom of her gown. "Aren't they wonderful?" said Philippa. "Did you ever see anything under heaven so young?" "She is older than he is," said Straker. "Do you remember when he wanted to give me one and I wouldn't take it?" "I have not forgotten." The lovers wandered on down the rosegarden and Philippa looked after them. Then she turned to Straker. "I've had a long talk with him. I've told him that he must settle down and that he couldn't do a better thing for himself than-" Straker didn't respond. He was thinking deeply. Her face was so mysterious, so ominous, that yet again he wondered My dear Fanny, that was an act of what she might be up to. He confessed the highest moral-" to himself that this time he didn't know. But he made her promise to go on the river with him the next day. They were to start at eleven-thirty. At eleven Fanny came to him in the library. "She's gone," said Fanny. "She's left a little note for you. She said you'd forgive her, you'd understand." "Do you?" said Straker. "She said she was going to be straight and see this thing through." "What thing?" "Furny's thing. What else do you suppose she's thinking of? She said she'd only got to lift her little finger and he'd come back to her; she said there ought to be fair play. Do you see? She's gone away-to save him." "Good Lord!" said Straker. But he saw. ΧΙ It was nearly twelve months before he heard again from Miss Tarrant. Then one day she wrote and asked him to come and have tea with her at her flat in Lexham Gardens. He went. His entrance coincided with the departure of Laurence Furnival and a lady whom Philippa introduced to him as Mrs. Laurence, whom, she said, he would remember under another name. Furnival's wife was younger than ever and more like Nora Viveash and more different. When the door closed on them Philippa turned to him with her radiance (the least bit overdone). "I made that marriage," she said, and staggered him. "Surely," he said, "it was made in heaven." "If this room is heaven. It was made here, six months ago." She faced him with all his memories. With all his memories and her own she faced him radiantly. "You know now," she said, “why I did it. It was worth while, wasn't it?" His voice struggled with his memories and stuck. It stuck in his throat. Before he left he begged her congratulations on a little affair of his own; a rather unhappy affair which had ended happily the week before last. He did not tell her that if it hadn't been for the things dear Fanny Brocklebank had done for him, the way she had mixed herself up with his unhappy little affair, it might have ended happily a year ago. "But," said Philippa, "how beautiful!" He never saw Miss Tarrant again. Their correspondence ceased after his marriage, and he gathered that she had no longer any use for him. The Foster-Children of the Shore A BY HOWARD J. SHANNON LL living things, including man, show in their life-history a continual tendency to undergo changes and variations which, in their degree of adaptiveness to the surroundings, determine the survival of the individual and the race; such is the primary principle of evolution. Yet, just as a dragonfly resting upon the hour-hand of a cathedral clock realizes no change of place or time during its brief sojourn upon the index of the great dial, neither does man immediately sense in the living world about him the apparently slight variations which further the progress of Nature's Long Day; for the forms and colors of animals and plants, their characteristics and behavior, seem always the same and immutable. Only the larger vision of science discerns the continual slight variations, the gradual but fundamental evolutions which, through the slow procession of the centuries, all creatures undergo, until, after the lapse of time, earth's face is changed and wears a far different aspect from that of an earlier age. Nowhere are these variational, developmental changes more readily traced than among the insects. And naturally the most striking evidences of adaptation are seen in species whose natural habitat has greatly changed; or, again, in those groups which have migrated to a very different region, for the variations in appearance and behavior are în proportion to the degree of change in the surroundings. Just such a colonized region, the sea-shore, many of us visit every year; how many see in its insect broods, in these ancient migrants, or offshoots from the fauna of the mainland, the curious and striking adaptations which they have undergone? They may be defined, in distinction from the more native animals of the ocean shallows, as the foster-children of the shore. spit between the wide-reaching ocean and the solitary bay, no sign of insect life is visible. But retire within the dunes. where the bayberry thicket's blue shadow is already spreading its long and longer checkered pattern across the hot, white sand; then, after a time, when the softly muffled, rhythmic beat and faint murmur of the summer ocean becomes fainter and fainter in the distance and finally ceases altogether, in the succeeding stillness many small creatures make their presence known. Close by my ear a cricket chirps, waits, then chirps again. Now loudly shrill from the near-by marsh harsh sibilations almost indefinitely prolonged as insect minstrels hidden there emit their scythe-sharpening z-z-z-z-zip; in the still air these sounds seem almost suspirations from the heat-baked grass and the rustling, rasping sedges in the sun-steeped, shimmering air. Dragon-flies, high overhead. weave to and fro in the blue vault; a white cabbage butterfly sails over the dune to my left, half settles, then wafts away where its fluttering fellows hover over the wet sand in company with other temporary wanderers from the mainland yellow sulphurs, a mourning-cloak, an occasional thistle butterfly. As the senses become more attentive other creatures are seen all about one, close at hand. Grotesque, long-bodied, predaceous flies occasionally settle upon the reeds; green and orange wasps hum past my ear, alight on the sand, and erratically hurry about with flipping wings in pursuit of their curious duties; while, right at my elbow, a spider poises on the tips of firmly extended limbs which stride its burrow, and, with eight red eyes agleam. waits, tense and immobile, for its prey, the embodiment of desire in leash. Compare some of the most character istic shore-dwellers with their cousins of the mainland, and see what striking Upon first arrival at an island sand- changes the shore has imposed. Consider the matter of color alone. Here is a brilliant green tiger - beetle of inland woods, bright as its native herbage; and here is an umber-colored relative of the shore whose darker, duller color fittingly protects this small forager while hunting among brown sea-weeds cast up along the water-line. Another beetle of the same family shows a body so nearly pure white that only a tracery of black lines on the ivory-white wings distinguishes it from the surrounding sand. Or, contrast the dun-colored grasshopper of dusty inland roads with the white, shore species of beautiful frosted whiteness; or compare the yellow-brown running spider of the woods and the Quaker-gray species here, well represented by that unobtrusively tinted arachnid which was seen earlier in the day. The male is even lighter, with a covering of hoary hairs which render it far less conspicuous; and, as this sex alone wanders abroad over the sand (only the female inhabiting the burrow), the instance of color adaptive to the specific creature's habits is most striking and significant. Another species is nearly pure white, for only a faint speckling of gray colors the VOL. CXXIII.-No. 736.-65 body, and this, indeed, still further incorporates the body outlines with the sand against which it rests. These individuals seem to wander more widely abroad, and more openly expose themselves than do their slightly darker - colored neighbors-again an instance of protective color and its correlative behavior. That the theory of such protection and the mimicry of surroundings has been overdone no one can deny; but it is equally certain that a remarkable sympathy does exist wide-spread in nature between the color of a creature and its habitat. And whether this has come about through some chemical change, some physiological response to surrounding color initiated through the nervous system (the maritime locust Trimerotropis shows even tinges of red or blue according to the particular color of the home soil), or whether it has slowly evolved through slow variations gradually becoming more and more adaptive, the naturalist is obliged, in many cases, to admit its protective, and hence its perpetuative value. Equally adaptive and variable, however, are insect habits and behavior, for these, too, must conform to the creature's to genus Ammophila which the Peckhams and Doctor Williston saw using a pebble as a tool to pound down the completed nest. Despite of this and other interesting studies, so far as the author knows, the ocean-shore behavior of these creatures is without definite record. Indeed, so great is their general varia AN INLAND GRASSHOPPER changed surroundings if it is to survive. And although many published statements have denied this, and have elaborated the automatic, unvarying character of animal behavior, zoological literature shows many authoritative notes on the other side of the question in this comparatively new and suggestive field. Forel's Algerian ants, which, when transported Zurich, learned to fortify their burrows against the attacks of a new enemy (a garden ant unknown to them in their native home); Atkinson's ants deserting the ground (their usual nestingplace) and building instead in a bush on the marshes beyond the reach of tides; and Peckham's wasps digging very different burrows in sandy hillsides from those they THE SHORE SPECIES ADAPTIVE COLORATION IN THE SHORE GRASSHOPPER Its pure whiteness, a strong contrast to the brown of the inland species, perfectly hides it when resting upon its native sand dig in garden clay-all these are plastic, responsive adaptations between the creature and the new problems which confront it. Interesting adaptations of this psychological character are present among our shore insects, particularly in that remarkable group, the "solitary wasps." Their very manner of birth seems to foster an engaging initiative, for the bees and ants are more restricted in variability of behavior owing to the subservience of the individual to the good of the commune, but the "solitaries," born alone in the wild, like many another original child of destiny, rely, from the very beginning, upon their own unassisted efforts. As a consequence, not only has each species developed special habits peculiar to itself, but separate individuals show deviations therefrom and personal tricks and traits. It was a member of the bility that only the most exhaustive comparative studies can determine how certainly the observed traits are responses to the peculiar problems of the shore. Yet even a few brief, selected notes will show certain idiosyncrasies almost certainly imposed by the beach life, in addition to the more general characteristics which are of perennial interest. The first small "huntress" suddenly attracts my attention one morning by alighting beside me while I am watching some green wasps in their household labors. Immediately she begins to dig. With head bent low, abdomen raised, and fore-feet rhythmically beating, she tosses back the sand till it pours outward and upward from beneath her body in a steady stream. Already she is half hidden; soon only the tip of the abdomen shows. Meanwhile, as a result of her labors, a mound of sand is heaping up at the entrance. Out upon this she climbs, and with swiftly flying fore-feet tosses the sand still farther away until the entrance is clear. Now again she disappears into the burrow, to dig still deeper the chamber designed to hold the egg, and the larva which is to be. She emerges once more, grasps a small gray object (a spider which she brought with her in the first place), and drags it into the burrow. |