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It was some days before he recovered from the wounds he had received, far more painful as he averred than the enemy's bullet, I intimated at the time to my friend that the wasps probably were the ghosts of the sepoys who had been killed in the serai, their bodies, by the transmigration of souls, having taken the shape of these malignant insects in order to wreak vengeance on their destroyers.
He and Lyra had now been in the water for days. Their clothes were never dry. Their shoes were rotten. The bruises on their feet and legs had become sores. On their bodies some of the insect bites had become festering wounds, as indeed was the case with all of us. Poisonous ants, biting flies, ticks, wasps, bees were a perpetual torment.
As a good monk writes of them: "The heathen came from the northern countries to Britain like stinging wasps, roamed about like savage wolves, robbing, biting, killing not only horses, sheep, and cattle, but also priests, acolytes, monks, and nuns." The Norsemen had found a gold mine in the south and from this time on they worked it with fierce hands.
These wasps nourish themselves only on the nectar of flowers; but their larvae, which they will never behold, must have fresh and succulent flesh still palpitating with life. The insect digs a tunnel in the soil, in which she places her eggs, and having provisioned the cell with selected game cricket, spider, caterpillar, or beetle she finally closes the entrance, which she does not again cross.
They were paddling gaily ahead when they saw in front of them a branch that stretched across the creek about a foot above the water. They had met plenty of similar obstructions, but this was different. There was a big wasps' nest on the branch and the air was filled with flying little pests.
And one saw, too, at a glance that she was different from ordinary wasps would make two, in fact, of any ordinary wasp; and her great jaws looked as if they could eat one and comfortably deal with more; whilst her dagger-sting, now unsheathed and ready probably for the first time could deliver a wound twice as deep and deadly as the ordinary wasp.
"Tut, tut! what's this?" and poised his glasses at his paper with a general air of remonstrance. "Giant wasps! What's the world coming to? American journalists, I suppose! Hang these Novelties! Giant gooseberries are good enough for me. "Nonsense!" said the Vicar, and drank off his coffee at a gulp, eyes steadfast on the paper, and smacked his lips incredulously.
She was gloomy, austere, strict, morose, almost ascetic, an enemy to everything that excuses man's presence on this earth, a nation of spoilers, looters, incendiaries and devastators, a nest of wasps beside a swarm of bees, a perpetual menace and danger to everything around her, as hard upon herself as upon others and boasting an ideal which may appear lofty, if it can be man's ideal to be unhappy and the contented slave of unrelenting discipline.
If, perchance, he looked three times at her consecutively, she gaped with expectation, hoping that he would tell her that her face was not so red to-day as usual a mark of rare affection. At last Guida noticed Jean's look. "What is it that you see, Maitre Jean?" she said. "Little black wasps, I think, ma'm'selle-little black wasps that sting." Guida did not understand.
The connection between character and bedtime which grew up from association when human life was less complex than now has some counterpart in the world of butterflies and insects. The industrious bees go to bed much earlier than the roving wasps.
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