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"But your grandiloquence, and your conduct in swinging the beetle how excessively odd! I was sure you were mad. And why did you insist on letting fall the bug, instead of a bullet, from the skull?" "Why, to be frank, I felt somewhat annoyed by your evident suspicions touching my sanity, and so resolved to punish you quietly, in my own way, by a little bit of sober mystification.
The larva when full-grown is about two inches long, and is quite the most rapacious creature which lives in our waters. The adult beetle is also purely carnivorous, but is perhaps not quite so rapacious. It would, however, probably attack a larger fish. The largest of English water beetles is Hydrophilus piceus.
"Well, let's have your beastly epic," said Turkey, as they burst into the study, to find Beetle deep in Viollet-le-Duc and some drawings. "We've had no end of a lark." "Epic? What epic? I've been down to the coastguard." "No epic? Then we will slay you, O Beetle," said Stalky, moving to the attack. "You've got something up your sleeve. I know, when you talk in that tone!"
Sometimes they met with some little shrewmice running on the snow. These very tiny things are so small, they hardly look bigger than a large black beetle. They lived on the seeds of the tall weeds, which they might be seen climbing and clinging to, yet were hardly heavy enough to weigh down the heads of the dry stalks.
Now and then he could hear a splash in the moat made by fish or water-vole, and once or twice he saw the star-bejewelled surface twinkle and move as if some creature were swimming across; but soon that was all calm again, and the booming, buzzing noise of some great beetle sweeping by on reckless wing sounded quite loud. "It's as lively as keeping the middle watch," said Hilary impatiently.
Every moment a heavy splash beneath some overhanging tuft of milfoil or water hemlock proclaimed the death- doom of a hapless beetle who had dropped into the stream beneath; yet still we fished and fished, and caught nothing, and seemed utterly careless about catching anything; till the old keeper who followed us, sighing and shrugging his shoulders, broke forth into open remonstrance: "Excuse my liberty, gentlemen, but what ever is the matter with you and master, sir?
Down yonder, a crooked black line in a white field, was the stream which many miles further on flowed into the American. Rising abrupt beyond it were the broken, precipitous cliffs of granite such as beetle above the mountain tributaries of the American. The rocks, like the river, were black, and looked far colder than the white world which extended in all directions.
But when I re-opened my eyes there was the same hole, and, oddly enough, the same beetle or one just like it. I had not noticed till that moment how much larger the hole was than it used to be in my young days. "'I suppose the rain and so forth wears them away in time, I said vaguely. "'I suppose it does, said the beetle politely; 'will you walk in?
There be pious, well-intending beetles, wedges, hammers, saws, and all other kinds of implements, good except where they come in the way of our fingers and from a beetle you can have only a beetle's gospel.
Good old sea!" He spat again approvingly, and was silent. McTurk and Beetle had taken out their books and were lying on their stomachs, chin in hand. The sea snored and gurgled; the birds, scattered for the moment by these new animals, returned to their businesses, and the boys read on in the rich, warm, sleepy silence.
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