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It might have got into a fold of my dressing-gown or into my slippers, or, in short, anywhere, in the various recesses for earwigs and hornets which a gentleman's habiliments afford. I satisfy myself at last as far as I can, seeing that I am not alone in the room, that it is not upon me. I look upon the carpet, the rug, the chair under the fender. It is non inventus.
It was one of those cottages which bespeak the ease and luxury not often found in more ostentatious mansions an abode which, at sixteen, the visitor contemplates with vague notions of poetry and love which, at forty, he might think dull and d -d expensive-which, at sixty, he would pronounce to be damp in winter, and full of earwigs in the summer.
The third table is covered with varieties of the kangaroo beetles, a brilliant collection of ladybirds, the varieties of earwigs, cockroaches, originally tropical insects only; the praying insects, called so from their habit of erecting their fore legs and assuming a prayerful attitude, when, in fact, they are preparing for an attack upon their prey: and the insects which the uninitiated visitor has already mistaken for pieces of stick, but which are the walking leaf-insects; some with wings like dead leaves, and others wingless.
Who is he that having read them will not remember with horror the dreadful account given by Speke of his encounters with these pests? My intense nervous watchfulness alone, I believe, saved me from a like calamity. Second to the earwigs in importance and in numbers were the white ants, whose powers of destructiveness were simply awful.
No sooner had it gone than I was seized with repentance not to have examined it more closely; not to have ascertained what the creature was. It might have been an earwig, a very large, motherly earwig; an earwig far gone in that way in which earwigs wish to be who love their lords. I have a profound horror of earwigs; I firmly believe that they do get into the ear.
So she led the way to a little conservatory, and a little pinery, and a little grapery, and a little aviary, and a little pheasantry, and a little dairy for show, and a little cottage for ditto, with a grotto full of shells, and a little hermitage full of earwigs, and a little ruin full of looking-glass, 'to enlarge and multiply the effect of the Gothic. 'But you could only put your head in, because it was just fresh painted, and though there had been a fire ordered in the ruin all night, it had only smoked.
This much was known, and it had been suggested more than once that the "disinfecting" qualities of the sunlight might be due to the chemical rays killing germs. Finsen, experimenting with earthworms, earwigs, and butterflies, in a box covered with glass of the different colors of the spectrum, noted first that the bugs that naturally burrowed in darkness became uneasy in the blue light.
That is a subject on which it is useless to argue with me upon philosophical grounds. I have a vivid recollection of a story told me by Mrs. Primmins, how a lady for many years suffered under the most excruciating headaches; how, as the tombstones say, "physicians were in vain;" how she died; and how her head was opened, and how such a nest of earwigs, ma'am, such a nest!
My mother cried a little behind her veil; but my aunt only said, "I never did care for earwigs in my tea;" and as for myself I was too excited and expectant to feel much sentiment about anything. On the journey I sat next to an exceptionally large and heavy man, who in his sleep and he slept often imagined me to be a piece of stuffing out of place.
Jane Dibabs the Dibabses lived in the beautiful little thatched white house one story high, covered all over with ivy and creeping plants, with an exquisite little porch with twining honysuckles and all sorts of things: where the earwigs used to fall into one's tea on a summer evening, and always fell upon their backs and kicked dreadfully, and where the frogs used to get into the rushlight shades when one stopped all night, and sit up and look through the little holes like Christians Jane Dibabs, SHE married a man who was a great deal older than herself, and WOULD marry him, notwithstanding all that could be said to the contrary, and she was so fond of him that nothing was ever equal to it.
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