well: he had fifty energetic sons to fill him with pride and high hopes. Each had dug his own meandering little tunnel in the bark of the pine-tree and all were getting on and were comfortably settled."My wife," Fridolin said to Maya, after they had known each other some time, "has arranged things so that none of my sons interferes with the others. They are not even acquainted; each goes his own way."Maya knew that human beings were none too fond of Fridolin and his people, though she herself liked him and liked his opinions and had found no reason to avoid him. In the morning before the sun arose and the woods were still asleep, she would hear his fine tapping and boring. It sounded like a delicate trickling, or as if the tree were breathing in its sleep. Later she would see the thin brown dust that he had emptied out of his corridor.Once he came at an early hour, as he often did, to wish her good-morning and ask if she had slept well."Not flying to-day?" he inquired."No, it's too windy."It was windy. The wind rushed and roared and flung the branches into a mad tumult. The leaves looked ready to fly away. After each great gust the sky would brighten, and in the pale light the trees seemed balder. The pine in which Maya and Fridolin lived shrieked with the voices of the wind as in a fury of anger and excitement.Fridolin sighed."I worked all night," he told Maya, "all night. But what can you do? You've got to do _some_thing to get _some_where. And I'm not altogether satisfied with this pine; I should have tackled a fir-tree." He wiped his brow and smiled in self-pity."How are your children?" asked Maya pleasantly."Thank you," said Fridolin, "thank you for your interest. But"--he hesitated--"but I don't supervise the way I used to. Still, I have reason to believe they are all doing well."As he sat there, a little brown man with slightly curtailed wing-sheaths and a breastplate that looked like a head too large for its body, Maya thought he was almost comical; but she knew he was a dangerous beetle who could do immense harm to the mighty trees of the forest, and if his tribe attacked a tree in numbers then the green needles were doomed, the tree would turn sear and die. It was utterly without defenses against the little marauders who destroyed the bark and the sap-wood. And the sap-wood is necessary to the life of a tree because it carries the sap up to the very tips of the branches. There were stories of how whole forests had fallen victims to the race of boring-beetles. Maya looked at Fridolin reflectively; she was awed into solemnity at the thought of the great power these little creatures possessed and of how important they could become.Fridolin sighed and said in a worried tone:"Ah, life would be beautiful if there were no woodpeckers."Maya 

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