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Dismounting, Tang-a-Dahit stood before his father. "Have the Dakoon's vermin fastened on the young bull at last?" asked Pango Dooni, his eyes glowering. "They crawled and fastened, but they have not fed," answered Tang-a-Dahit in a strong voice, for his wounds had not sunk deep.
She turned a corner and went into a shop in which queer stuffs were hanging. Behind the dirty panes a lighted candle showed pots, porcelain vases, a clarinet, and a bride's wreath. He did not understand what pleasure she found in her search. "These shops are full of vermin. What can you find interesting in them?" "Everything. I think of the poor bride whose wreath is under that globe.
"It's quite possible," said the forester's daughter. "But I know that my little mouse had something to do with it; so I don't defend her any longer and I don't give her any sugar either." "That's right," said the odd man. "For rats and mice are one and the same thing; and they are noxious vermin, the whole lot of them.
They have the typical characters of vermin; unproductive activity combined with disproportionate destructiveness. Just as a rat will gnaw his way through a Holbein panel, or shred up the Vatican Codex to make a nest, so the professional criminal will melt down priceless medieval plate to sell in lumps for a few shillings. The analogy is perfect.
There was comparatively little difficulty in ferreting out the "vermin" to use the expression of a Walloon historian of that age so that it was only necessary to maintain in good working order the apparatus for destroying the noxious creatures when unearthed.
In the height of his good-humour, meeting a common beggar upon the road who was no conjurer, as he went to relieve him he found his pocket was picked; that being a kind of palmistry at which this race of vermin are very dexterous.
Filth and vermin abound to an extent to which no one who has not seen it can have any idea. The "Dusthole" is only one, alas of many similar districts in this highly civilised land. SICKNESS, FRIENDLESSNESS DEATH. In hospitals it is a known fact that these girls are not treated at all like other cases; they inspire disgust, and are most frequently discharged before being really cured.
Clearly, at some time in the Long-Ago of human decay the Morlocks' food had run short. Possibly they had lived on rats and such-like vermin. Even now man is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was far less than any monkey. His prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct. And so these inhuman sons of men ! I tried to look at the thing in a scientific spirit.
Two or three kinds of traps were tried, but without much success. A pit they could leap out of, and from a noose they could free themselves by cutting the rope with their sharp teeth! At length the field-cornet resorted to a plan much practised by the boors of Southern Africa for ridding their farms of these and similar vermin. It was the "gun-trap."
'Randyvowse! said he at length, 'it were a good job it were brenned down, for such a harbour for vermin a never seed: t' rats ran across t' yard by hunders an' thousands; an' it were no man's property as a've heerd tell, but belonged to Chancery, up i' Lunnon; so wheere's t' harm done, my fine felly? Philip was silent.
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