Even to a naturalist with a tolerant feeling for all living things, both great and small, it is not always an unmixed pleasure to have a wasp at table. I have occasionally felt a considerable degree of annoyance at the presence of a self-invited guest of that kind.

Some time ago when walking I sat down at noon on a fallen tree-trunk to eat my luncheon, which consisted of a hunk of cake and some bananas. The wind carried the fragrance of the fruit into the adjacent wood, and very soon wasps began to arrive, until there were fifteen or twenty about me. They were so aggressive and greedy, almost following every morsel I took into my mouth, that I determined to let them have as much as they wanted—and something more! I proceeded to make a mash of the ripest portions of the fruit mixed with whisky from my pocket-flask, and spread it nicely on the bark. At once they fell on it with splendid appetites, but to my surprise the alcohol produced no effect. I have seen big locusts and other important insects tumbling about and acting generally as if demented after a few sips of rum and sugar, but these wasps, when they had had their full of banana and whisky, buzzed about and came and went and quarrelled with one another just as usual, and when I parted from them there was not one of the company who could be said to be the worse for liquor. Probably there is no more steady-headed insect than the wasp, unless it be his noble cousin and prince, the hornet, who has a quite humanlike unquenchable thirst for beer and cider.

But the particular wasp at table I had in my mind remains to be spoken of. I was lunching at the house of a friend, the vicar of a lonely parish in Hampshire, and besides ourselves there were five ladies, four of them young, at our round table. The window stood open, and by-and-by a wasp flew in and began to investigate the dishes, the plates, then the eaters themselves, impartially buzzing before each face in turn. On his last round, before taking his departure, he continued to buzz so long before my face, first in front of one eye then the other, as if to make sure that they were fellows and had the same expression, that I at length impatiently remarked that I did not care for his too flattering attentions. And that was really the only inconsiderate or inhospitable word his visit had called forth. Yet there were, I have said, five ladies present! They had neither welcomed nor repelled him, and had not regarded him; and although it was impossible to be unconscious of his presence at table, it was as if he had not been there. But then these ladies were cyclists: one, in addition to the beautiful brown colour with which the sun had painted her face, showed some dark and purple stains on cheek and forehead—marks of a resent dangerous collision with a stone wall at the foot of a steep hill.

Here I had intended telling about other meetings with other wasps, but having touched on a subject concerning which nothing is ever said and volumes might be written—namely, the Part played by the bicycle in the emancipation of women—I will go on with it. That they are not really emancipated doesn't matter, since they move towards that goal, and doubtless they would have gone on at the same old, almost imperceptible rate for long years but for the sudden impulse imparted by the wheel. Middle-aged people can recall how all England held up its hands and shouted "No, no!" from shore to shore at the amazing and upsetting spectacle of a female sitting astride on a safety machine, indecently moving her legs up and down just like a man. But having tasted the delights of swift easy motion, imparted not by any extraneous agency, but—oh, sweet surprise!—by her own in-dwelling physical energy, she refused to get off. By staying on she declared her independence; and we who were looking on—some of us—rejoiced to see it; for did we not also see, when these venturesome leaders returned to us from careering unattended over the country, when easy motion had tempted them long distances into strange, lonely places, where there was no lover nor brother nor any chivalrous person to guard and rescue them from innumerable perils—from water and fire, mad bulls and ferocious dogs, and evil-minded tramps and drunken, dissolute men, and from all venomous, stinging, creeping, nasty, horrid things—did we not see that they were no longer the same beings we had previously known, that in their long flights in heat and cold and rain and wind and dust they had shaken off some ancient weakness that was theirs, that without loss of femininity they had become more like ourselves in the sense that they were more self-centred and less irrational?

But women, alas! can seldom follow up a victory. They are, as even the poet when most anxious to make the best of them mournfully confesses:

variable as the shade
By the light quivering aspen made.

Inconstant in everything, they soon cast aside the toy which had taught them so great a lesson and served them so well, carrying them so far in the direction they wished to go. And no sooner had they cast it aside than a fresh toy, another piece of mechanism, came on the scene to captivate their hearts, and instead of a help, to form a hindrance. The motor not only carried them back over all the ground they had covered on the bicycle, but further still, almost back to the times of chairs and fans and smelling-salts and sprained ankles at Lyme Regis. A painful sight was the fair lady not yet forty and already fat, overclothed and muffled up in heavy fabrics and furs, a Pekinese clasped in her arms, reclining in her magnificent forty-horse-power car with a man (Homo sapiens) in livery to drive her from shop to shop and house to house. One could shut one's eyes until it passed—shut them a hundred or five hundred times a day in every thoroughfare in every town in England; but alas! one couldn't shut out the fact that this spectacle had fascinated and made captive the soul of womankind, that it was now their hope, their dream, their beautiful ideal—the one universal ideal that made all women sisters, from the greatest ladies in the land downwards, and still down, from class to class, even to the semi-starved ragged little pariah girl scrubbing the front steps of a house in Mean Street for a penny.

The splendid spectacle has now been removed from their sight, but is it out of mind? Are they not waiting and praying for the war to end so that there may be petrol to buy and men returned from the front to cast off their bloodstained clothes and wash and bleach their blackened faces, to put themselves in a pretty livery and drive the ladies and their Pekinese once more?

A friend of mine once wrote a charming booklet entitled Wheel Magic, which was all about his rambles on the machine and its effect on him. He is not an athlete—on the contrary he is a bookish man who has written books enough to fill a cart, and has had so much to do with books all his life that one might imagine he had by some strange accident been born in the reading-room of the British Museum; or that originally he had actually been a bookworm, a sort of mite, spontaneously engendered between the pages of a book, and that the supernatural being who presides over the reading-room had, as a little pleasantry, transformed him into a man so as to enable him to read the books on which he had previously nourished himself.

I can't follow my friend's wanderings and adventures as, springing out of his world of books, he flits and glides like a vagrant, swift-winged, irresponsible butterfly about the land, sipping the nectar from a thousand flowers and doing his hundred miles in a day and feeling all the better for it, for this was a man's book, and the wheel and its magic was never a necessity in man's life. But it has a magic of another kind for woman, and I wish that some woman of genius would arise and, inspired perhaps by the ghost of Benjamin Ward Richardson in his prophetic mood, tell of this magic to her sisters. Tell them, if they are above labour in the fields or at the wash-tub, that the wheel, without fatiguing, will give them the deep breath which will purify the blood, invigorate the heart, stiffen the backbone, harden the muscles; that the mind will follow and accommodate itself to these physical changes; finally, that the wheel will be of more account to them than all the platforms in the land, and clubs of all the pioneers and colleges, all congresses, titles, honours, votes, and all the books that have been or ever will be written.