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Updated: September 5, 2025
Then she gave orders to her body-guard to keep all suitors at a respectful distance lest some stupid gallant, a horn-bug or a cockchafer dazzled by the light should approach too near and hurt the princess or shake her throne. No sooner had twilight faded away, than forth came the golden beetle, who stood on a stamen and making obeisance, said:
But Mr Cripps had forgotten to send the line, and to-day, when Loman, according to arrangement, came up to the lock-keeper's to receive the rod, the keeper of the Cockchafer was most profuse in his apologies. He was most sorry, but his friend had been ill and not able to attend to business.
As it was, he was once or twice driven completely into a corner, and had to acknowledge, for the sake of telling one lie, that the last twenty statements he had made had been lies too. Still Mr Loman kept at him. Now he wanted to know exactly how often his son had visited the Cockchafer? When he was there last? When the time before that? What he had done during his visits? Had he played cards?
A cockchafer darting by close to my ear with a loud hum sends a shiver through me, partly of pleasure at the reminder of past summers, and partly of fear lest he should get caught in my hair. The Man of Wrath says they are pernicious creatures and should be killed.
Yet had the captain and his men known the cause of all this had they been aware that that flash, half-tipsy cad of a fellow who, with half a dozen of his "pals," was watching the match with a critical air, there at the ropes was the landlord of the Cockchafer himself, the holder of Loman's "little bill" for 30 pounds, they would perhaps have understood and forgiven their comrade's clumsiness.
As to the Cockchafer, he was thoroughly frightened at the thought of having been seen there, and fully determined, even before Bramble's threat, never again to cross its threshold. After all, Stephen knew he had little enough to fear from that small braggadocio; Bramble had neither the wit nor the skill to use his discovery to any advantage.
His way to the chemist's lay past the turning up to the Cockchafer, and the idea occurred to him to turn in on the way back and talk over the event of the hour with Mr Cripps, whom he had not seen since the bagatelle-lesson a week ago.
So far so good. But now tell me, if you please, why the larvae of the Oryctes and the Scarabaeus, living in vegetable mould, the larva of the Anoxia, dwelling in the sand, and the larva of the Cockchafer in our cultivated fields have not also acquired the faculty of walking on their backs?
Now it was a great stag-beetle that was caught a great horny-headed and horny-bodied fellow, so strong that he could force his way out of a closed hand by sheer pushing, like his friend the cockchafer, who now began to whirr and drone about under the shady boughs of the trees, but who would not come near enough to be captured, till at last one of them came bump up against Mr Inglis's hat, in its headlong flight, when Fred picked it out of the grass where it had fallen, and was astonished at the slow but strenuous efforts the insect made to escape.
But the cockchafer did not trouble himself at all about the matter. He seated himself by her side on a large green leaf, gave her some honey from the flowers to eat, and told her she was very pretty, though not in the least like a cockchafer. After a time, all the cockchafers turned up their feelers, and said, "She has only two legs! how ugly that looks." "She has no feelers," said another.
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