A TRAMP ABROAD By Mark Twain

They lock themselves together and chew each other’s jaws

for a while; then they roll and tumble on the ground till

one loses a horn or a leg and has to haul off for repairs.

They make up and go to work again in the same old insane way,

but the crippled ant is at a disadvantage; tug as he may,

the other one drags off the booty and him at the end of it.

Instead of giving up, he hangs on, and gets his shins

bruised against every obstruction that comes in the way.

By and by, when that grasshopper leg has been dragged

all over the same old ground once more, it is finally

dumped at about the spot where it originally lay,

the two perspiring ants inspect it thoughtfully and decide

that dried grasshopper legs are a poor sort of property

after all, and then each starts off in a different

direction to see if he can’t find an old nail or something

else that is heavy enough to afford entertainment and at

the same time valueless enough to make an ant want to own it.

There in the Black Forest, on the mountainside,

I saw an ant go through with such a performance as this

with a dead spider of fully ten times his own weight.

The spider was not quite dead, but too far gone to resist.

He had a round body the size of a pea. The little ant–

observing that I was noticing–turned him on his back,

sunk his fangs into his throat, lifted him into the air and

started vigorously off with him, stumbling over little pebbles,

stepping on the spider’s legs and tripping himself up,

dragging him backward, shoving him bodily ahead, dragging him

up stones six inches high instead of going around them,

climbing weeds twenty times his own height and jumping

from their summits–and finally leaving him in the middle

of the road to be confiscated by any other fool of an

ant that wanted him. I measured the ground which this

ass traversed, and arrived at the conclusion that what he

had accomplished inside of twenty minutes would constitute

some such job as this–relatively speaking–for a man;

to wit: to strap two eight-hundred-pound horses together,

carry them eighteen hundred feet, mainly over (not around)

boulders averaging six feet high, and in the course

of the journey climb up and jump from the top of one

precipice like Niagara, and three steeples, each a hundred

and twenty feet high; and then put the horses down,

in an exposed place, without anybody to watch them,

and go off to indulge in some other idiotic miracle for

vanity’s sake.

Science has recently discovered that the ant does not

lay up anything for winter use. This will knock him

out of literature, to some extent. He does not work,

except when people are looking, and only then when the

observer has a green, naturalistic look, and seems to be

taking notes. This amounts to deception, and will injure

him for the Sunday-schools. He has not judgment enough

to know what is good to eat from what isn’t. This amounts

to ignorance, and will impair the world’s respect for him.

He cannot stroll around a stump and find his way home again.

This amounts to idiocy, and once the damaging fact

is established, thoughtful people will cease to look

up to him, the sentimental will cease to fondle him.

His vaunted industry is but a vanity and of no effect,

since he never gets home with anything he starts with.

This disposes of the last remnant of his reputation

and wholly destroys his main usefulness as a moral agent,

since it will make the sluggard hesitate to go to him

any more. It is strange, beyond comprehension, that so

manifest a humbug as the ant has been able to fool so

many nations and keep it up so many ages without being

found out.

The ant is strong, but we saw another strong thing,

where we had not suspected the presence of much muscular

power before. A toadstool–that vegetable which springs

to full growth in a single night–had torn loose and

lifted a matted mass of pine needles and dirt of twice