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It had certainly a black head and great feelers. I have a greater horror of hornets, if possible, than I have of earwigs. Two hornets will kill a man, and three a carriage-horse sixteen hands high. However, the creature was gone. Yes, but where? Where had I so rashly thrown it?
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.
However ridiculous this fancy may appear, it had taken such hold of the man, that he was really wasting away his appetite failing as well as his spirits. He would not take the least exercise, or stir from his chair, scarcely move or permit himself to be moved, hand, foot, or head, lest he should disturb or waken this nest of earwigs.
Why, old Lady Blanchflower looked upon you and me, Miss Jackson, as no better than earwigs! I sent her a packet of our leaflets once by post. Well she never used to give me any work, so she couldn't take it away. But she got Mrs. David Jones at Thring Farm to take away hers, and Mrs. Willy Smith, the Vet's wife, you remember? and two or three more.
I knew HE knew that I wasn't afraid of him, but that I was and terribly of earwigs, "those mortal bugs o' the field." So I let him disappear, shouting lustily for all hands to repel boarders, while I strolled inland, down the village. There was a touch of adventure in the expedition. This was not our own village, but a foreign one, distant at least a mile.
Hunsden himself tolerated the drivelling theorists; with the practical men he seemed leagued hand and heart. He has a philanthropic motive for coming to smoke his cigar in our porch on summer evenings; he says he does it to kill the earwigs amongst the roses, with which insects, but for his benevolent fumigations, he intimates we should certainly be overrun.
EARWIGS. These insects are often destructive in gardens, especially where carnations, nuts, or filberts, pears and apples are reared. Their depredations on the flowers may be prevented by putting the bowl of a tobacco-pipe on the sticks which support them, into which they will creep in the day time, and may be destroyed.
She leads the way into 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.
There was an inhospitable smell in the room, of cold soot and hot dust; and, as I looked up into the corners of the tester over my head, I thought what a number of blue-bottle flies from the butchers', and earwigs from the market, and grubs from the country, must be holding on up there, lying by for next summer.
He feared also that it would be a very insect-ridden place, and that their calm pursuits would often be interrupted by things like earwigs. It was to be ancient, and much thatched and latticed and rose-overgrown. It was, too, to be very small; the smallest of labourers' cottages.
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