upon the doomed city. Forward and anywhere is the motto of the pell-mell flight; all throw down their burdens that they may run the faster, and shamefully abandon their shields that their arms may not impede their course. Big and little, male and female, old and young, all scamper off alike over the untidy thresholds, and there is no distinction of caste under the common horror of a home that requires sweeping up.
Such a spectacle is truly sublime, for behind the ants there is no avenging Michael-arm, that they should thus precipitately fall into “hideous rout;” no Zulu impi; no hyena horde of Bashkirs, as there was after the flying Tartars; no remorseless pursuit of any kind. Indeed, persecution and fiery trials they confront unmoved, so there is no element of fear in their conduct.
It arises entirely from a generous impatience of neighbors’ untidy habits, from a superb intolerance of dirt. When was such an example ever set, or when will it ever be followed, by human beings? No single city, not even a village, is ever recorded to have been abandoned on account of uncleanliness; and yet what a grand episode in national history it would be, if such had happened, — had the men of Cologne, for instance, ever gone out into the country-side and all encamped there, in dignified protest against the “six-and-seventy separate stinks” of their undrained city! No instance even is on record of a single householder rushing from his premises with all his family rather than endure cobwebs and dust; nor, indeed, of a single child refusing to stay in its nursery because it was untidy. We are still, therefore, far behind the Colombia ant in the matter of cleanliness.
