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And then you will pass years in a dungeon, riveted to a wall, groping for your jug that you may drink, gnawing at a horrible loaf of darkness which dogs would not touch, eating beans that the worms have eaten before you. You will be a wood-louse in a cellar. Ah!
You must know the little grizzly beast, which rolls itself up into a ball whenever it thinks itself in danger, and who would be taken for an insect by anyone who was not taught otherwise. The wood-louse has neither gills hanging down outside, nor anything inside her body which resembles the breathing apparatus of her great relations.
Many such creatures, rolled up just as the wood-louse curls itself, in tight balls, have been found in a fossil state; and there is a little petrified crustacean with wonderful eyes, which has been found in the slate quarries of South Wales. It is called the Trilobite, because it is composed of three lobes or divisions, and is an animal of the same kind as the lobster.
There was Spider corner, Caterpillar corner, Wood-louse corner, and Cricket corner. Cricket corner was near the kitchen and was highly esteemed. It was not so cold there as elsewhere. From the refectory the names had passed to the boarding-school, and there served as in the old College Mazarin to distinguish four nations.
He stopped for a moment, coughed, turned up the collar of his coat, glanced at the men, who were following all his movements with their eyes, and then went up the street towards the town. The Captain watched him for a moment, and turning to Abyedok said, smilingly: "Probably you were right after all, you son of a scorpion and a wood-louse! You nose out every evil thing.
"I have seen such a grand fellow in the street," said I to Juste on coming in. "It must be our neighbor," replied Juste, who described, in fact, the man I had just met. "A man who lives like a wood-louse would be sure to look like that," he added. "What dejection and what dignity!" "One is the consequence of the other." "What ruined hopes! What schemes and failures!" "Seven leagues of ruins!
I'm either up to my knees in grass or clay fighting Revolutionists, or I'm riding hard day and night till I'm round-backed like a wood-louse, to make up for all the good time I so badly lost in your little island. You wouldn't have expected that, my friend with the tongue that stings, would you?
Touch a wood-louse on an excursion across your sheet of paper, and the creature shams death; and in something the same way my acquaintance would stop short in the middle of a sentence, while a cart went by, to save the strain to his voice. Following the example of Fontenelle, he was thrifty of pulse-strokes, and concentrated all human sensibility in the innermost sanctuary of Self.
You will never, therefore, see a wood-louse strutting about in the sunshine, where he would dry up far too quickly; but if ever you get into a dark, damp corner, there you have every chance of finding one. Animals who breathe through their legs and through their stomachs! You are astonished, and ask, What are we coming to?
Antennae, transparent with pale brown tips, and a few pale brown spots in them, colour pale blue down centre of the back, dark prussian blue on each side. It had the power of rolling itself up nearly double; in the same manner as a wood-louse, but not quite so close; eyes distinct and prominent.
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