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The people can never be thankful enough that these visitors differed from Nuu in their lack of regard for the snakes, scorpions, centipedes, tarantulas, and mosquitoes that are so common to tropic lands, for, having neglected to import these afflictions, the islands got on without them until recently. Mosquitoes were taken to Hawaii on an American ship.
I counted no fewer than three of the giant red centipedes whose poisonous touch, called "the zayat kiss," is certain death; several species of scorpion were represented; and some kind of bloated, unwieldy spider, so gross of body that its short, hairy legs could scarce support it, crawled, hideous, almost at my feet.
I've routed out centipedes and scorpions and poison bugs of all kinds until I am tired of it. Tabitha caught a baby tarantula under her bed the other morning, and we found something in the wood-pile last week that the folks at the hotel called a Gila monster.
Scorpions come out of the wood they burn on the earthen floor, and monster cockroaches nibble your toes at night. The thick, hot grass roofs of the ranches harbor centipedes, which drop on your face as you sleep, and bite alarmingly. These many-legged creatures grow to the length of eight or nine inches, and run to and fro with great speed.
Another friend, my old and particularly valued friend, Professor Sniff, curator of Mahon's Museum of Marvels but I'll let that affair pass; for Professor Sniff certainly did not intend to wound my feelings by his apparent indifference; moreover, he has promised to send me for my private collection all the duplicates that occur in section E of his museum, which section is devoted exclusively to dried centipedes, tarantulas, and beetles and to Mexican lizards in bottles of alcohol.
For several months after leaving Rivermouth I carried on a voluminous correspondence with Pepper Whitcomb; but it gradually dwindled down to a single letter a month, and then to none at all. But while he remained at the Temple Grammar School he kept me advised of the current gossip of the town and the doings of the Centipedes.
To the wondering throngs which went down Long Island to see her huge gray bulk swinging lazily in the wind, with men clinging in bunches, like centipedes, to her anchor ropes, and her red, white, and blue-tipped rudder turning idly, she was more than a great big balloon, but a forerunner of times to come.
Scores of the homes of small folk were uncovered by our weeding out wasps, termites, ants, bees, wood-roaches, centipedes; and occasionally a small snake or great solemn toad came out from the débris at the roots, the latter blinking and swelling indignantly at this sudden interruption of his siesta.
But instead of helping him, that unruly Kami endeavours to compass his death by thrusting him into a snake-house; by putting him into a nest of centipedes and wasps, and finally by shooting an arrow into a moor, sending him to seek it and then setting fire to the grass.
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