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Updated: May 27, 2025
I have always felt singularly drawn towards soldiers, even as a girl; though your poor dear uncle could not bear them. Of course one does not like to think of their fighting and killing each other, but then they do not seem to do that sort of thing nowadays." "So much for the old lady," said MacShaughnassy, as he folded up the letter and returned it to his pocket. "What says culture?"
Meanwhile, MacShaughnassy said that he knew a story dealing with the same theme, namely, the too close attachment of a woman to a strange man, which really had a moral, which moral was: don't have anything to do with inventions. Brown, who had patented a safety gun, which he had never yet found a man plucky enough to let off, said it was a bad moral.
Brown and MacShaughnassy came down together on the Saturday afternoon; and, as soon as they had dried themselves, and had had some tea, we settled down to work. Jephson had written that he would not be able to be with us until late in the evening, and Brown proposed that we should occupy ourselves until his arrival with plots. "Let each of us," said he, "sketch out a plot.
MacShaughnassy maintains that it is simply coincidence. "How do you know," he says, "that you wouldn't have been ill if you hadn't eaten any? You're queer enough now, any one can see, and I'm very sorry for you; but, for all that you can tell, if you hadn't eaten any of that stuff you might have been very much worse perhaps dead. In all probability, it has saved your life."
MacShaughnassy thought they seemed queer, and was of opinion that they were breaking up. Speaking for myself, I can only say that a healthier-looking lot of beetles I never wish to see. One, it is true, did die that very evening. He was detected in the act of trying to make off with an unfairly large portion of the poison, and three or four of the others set upon him savagely and killed him.
At the end of the telling of his tale, MacShaughnassy lifted his feet off the mantelpiece, and set to work to wake up his legs; and Jephson took a hand, and began to spin us stories.
They finished it all up, and were evidently vexed that there was not more. But they did not die. We told these facts to MacShaughnassy. He smiled, a very grim smile, and said in a low tone, full of meaning, "Let them eat!" It appeared that this was one of those slow, insidious poisons. It did not kill the beetle off immediately, but it undermined his constitution.
MacShaughnassy puffed a mouthful of smoke over a spider which was just about to kill a fly. This caused the spider to fall into the river, from where a supper-hunting swallow quickly rescued him. "You remind me," he said, "of a scene I once witnessed in the office of The Daily well, in the office of a certain daily newspaper. It was the dead season, and things were somewhat slow.
Of the four joint authors, he whom I call "MacShaughnassy" has laid aside his title to all things beyond six feet of sun-scorched ground in the African veldt; while from him I have designated "Brown" I have borrowed but little, and that little I may fairly claim to have made my own by reason of the artistic merit with which I have embellished it.
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