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Bernard route into Italy, as against the Simplon. With redoubled energy, he now supervised the thousands of details that were needed to insure success: for, while prone to indulging in grandiose schemes, he revelled in the work which alone could bring them within his grasp: or, as Wellington once remarked, "Nothing was too great or too small for his proboscis."
Who doubts that a mosquito will perch itself upon the skin of a human being, pierce it with its proboscis, and suck away until it is gorged with blood! Why does it appear strange that a bat should do the same? Now your closet-naturalist will believe that the bat does suck the blood of cattle and horses, but denies that it will attack man! This is sheer nonsense.
Fortunately, however, that was not till two months or so after the bites had been inflicted, when suddenly, after a two days' cold rain, they all died, and on removing the skins of several of them I found the long yellow streaks upon the flesh which are characteristic of death from bites from the tsetse, marking the spot where the insect had inserted his proboscis.
The only one of the party that was in dangerous proximity to that dreaded proboscis was Fritz; but Fritz had already been well warned of the wicked designs of the great brute, and was sufficiently swift-footed and sage enough to give the animal a wide berth.
I suspect the bee does not tell its fellows what it has found, but that they smell out the secret; it doubtless bears some evidence with it upon its feet or proboscis that it has been upon honey-comb and not upon flowers, and its companions take the hint and follow, arriving always many seconds behind. Then the quantity and quality of the booty would also betray it.
Then the unhappy creature, unable to free herself, finds herself suspended in the air, at right angles to her proboscis, far from any foothold or point of vantage, at the extremity of her disproportionately long pike, that "fatal stake."
And the arch-master of impudence looked round with modest suavity, and, in an audible whisper, assured the gentleman that sat next to him, that Captain Headman's argument of the demolished proboscis went for nothing, for that there were other causes equally efficacious as cold and frost, for destroying gentlemen's noses. In the sequel, this very learned tutor had to instruct me in navigation.
His anxiety, for instance, when he read of the young aide de camp being shot and dragged by the stirrup, to know "what became of the empty horse," was very entertaining; and when he had read the description of Davoust's face and person, where I describe his nose, as neither fine nor dumpy a fair enough proboscis as noses go, he laid down the Log with the most laughable seriousness.
The sucking-disk at the end of my proboscis looks like a twisted pewter plate." "Have you a sucking-disk?" asked Maya. "Goodness gracious, of course! Now tell me. What do you want to know about human beings? Never mind about my proboscis being out of joint. It'll be all right. I think I had best tell you a few things from my own life.
The next picture was a sort of enlarged and elongated house fly, apparently, of sombre grey color, with a narrow body, thick proboscis and wings that overlapped like the blades of a pair of shears. "This," he went on, "is a picture of the now well known tse-tse fly found over a large area of Africa. It has a bite something like a horse-fly and is a perfect blood- sucker.
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