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INTER-AMERICA
The ant, however, was a heartless usurer. Hence she became envious. As she herself could not sing, she hated the balm-cricket mortally, because she saw that she was loved by everybody.
“What did you do during the good weather?”
“I . . . I sang!”
“Sang? Then dance now!” and she closed the door in her face.
Result: the balm-cricket died there, frozen to death; and when spring returned, the world wore a sadder aspect. It was that, in the symphony of things, it missed the strident note of that balm-cricket that had died as a result of the ant’s miserliness. If the usurer had died instead, nobody would have missed her.
ARTISTS—poets, painters, musicians—are the balm-crickets of human-
ity.
