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Then, perhaps, trees and bushes are drifted thither before the trade-wind; and entangled in their roots are seeds of other plants, and eggs or cocoons of insects; and so a few flowers and a few butterflies and beetles set up for themselves upon the new land. A great crab he is, who walks upon the tips of his toes a foot high above the ground.
"You talk of nothing being changed by our alarm, two days ago, because this table stands in the middle of the room, and the ants and beetles have not carried off your pretty work. Hey!" "May I speak, grandpapa?" "Speak." "I said so because nobody's house is burnt, or even robbed; and nobody has been killed, or even hurt." "But, nevertheless, there is a great change.
The beetles could so prolong their lives for a few hours, maybe a few days, but they were really ended on that moment when the transport cut communication. Shann was sure that the officer, at least, understood that. The Terran was dragged away from the domes toward the river down which he and Thorvald had once escaped.
An old, neglected orchard may seem perfectly barren of life; insects dead, leaves fallen, and sap frozen; but the warm hearts of these venerable trees may shelter much beside the larvæ of boring beetles, and we may reap a winter harvest of which the farmer knows nothing. Poke a stick into a knothole and stir up the leaves at the bottom of the cavity, and then look in.
It was of no avail that the pavements of Paris were there on every side, the classic and splendid hotels of the Rue de Varennes a couple of paces away, the dome of the Invalides close at hand, the Chamber of Deputies not far off; the carriages of the Rue de Bourgogne and of the Rue Saint-Dominique rumbled luxuriously, in vain, in the vicinity, in vain did the yellow, brown, white, and red omnibuses cross each other's course at the neighboring cross-roads; the Rue Plumet was the desert; and the death of the former proprietors, the revolution which had passed over it, the crumbling away of ancient fortunes, absence, forgetfulness, forty years of abandonment and widowhood, had sufficed to restore to this privileged spot ferns, mulleins, hemlock, yarrow, tall weeds, great crimped plants, with large leaves of pale green cloth, lizards, beetles, uneasy and rapid insects; to cause to spring forth from the depths of the earth and to reappear between those four walls a certain indescribable and savage grandeur; and for nature, which disconcerts the petty arrangements of man, and which sheds herself always thoroughly where she diffuses herself at all, in the ant as well as in the eagle, to blossom out in a petty little Parisian garden with as much rude force and majesty as in a virgin forest of the New World.
Keep down the mice, and that sort of thing, you know. This animal's a demon for mice. This was a telling argument. Trentham's sister had lately been married, and she certainly had had some idea of investing in a cat to adorn her home. 'As for beetles, continued the invalid, pushing home his advantage, 'they simply daren't come out of their lairs for fear of him.
Judge "Oily" Ackroyd's greeting of the guest within his gates did not bear out the sobriquet of his public life. It was curt to the verge of harshness. "What is the market quotation on beetles, judge?" asked the young man, tapping the rug with his stick. "What are you talking about?" demanded the other, drawing down his heavy brows.
Since he had learned that the crab was nought else but a beetle living in water, and since a company had been formed in Germany for making beetles into preserves for dessert, he had been unable to look with undismayed eye upon these retrograde monsters. "Ach, take it away, Boris," sighed the host. He himself was not eating, for was he not atoning for his sins?
Wollaston, that certain large groups of beetles, elsewhere excessively numerous, which absolutely require the use of their wings, are here almost entirely absent. These several considerations make me believe that the wingless condition of so many Madeira beetles is mainly due to the action of natural selection, combined probably with disuse.
Now, just in proportion as the beetles and flies grow still more cautious, even the green lizards themselves fail to pick up a satisfactory livelihood; and so at last we get that most remarkable Nicaraguan form, decked all round with leaf-like expansions, and looking so like the foliage on which it rests that no beetle on earth can possibly detect it.
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