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Updated: June 23, 2025
"Well," proceeds the detective, "I meets-havin' an eye out all the while-Sergeant Dobbs one morning-Dobbs knows every roost in the Points better than me! and says he, 'Fitzgerald, that are woman, that crazy woman, you've been in tow of so long, has turned up. There was a row in Black-beetle Hole last night.
Nothing could look more innocent and inoffensive than the kauri-bug, yet few insects rival it in crime. It is an oval shape, anything under and up to the size of a crown piece. It is flat, black, hard, and shiny, and resembles a cross between the English black-beetle and the woodlouse or slater. It stinks. That is all it does, but it is enough. Look at it, and it is harmless enough.
It was as if one had diverted some terrific electric current which should have been controlling a vast system of machinery, and turned it on to annihilate a black-beetle. In the present case, of course, the result is as might have been expected.
It's better than doing Thucydides with Downing. We've got math, till the interval, so I don't see anything of him all day; which won't hurt me." "He isn't a bad sort of chap, when you get to know him," said Adair. "I can't have done, then. I don't know which I'd least soon be, Downing or a black-beetle, except that if one was Downing one could tread on the black-beetle. Dash this rain.
For one life thousands would be saved from corruption and decay. One death, and a hundred lives in exchange it's simple arithmetic! Besides, what value has the life of that sickly, stupid, ill-natured old woman in the balance of existence! No more than the life of a louse, of a black-beetle, less in fact because the old woman is doing harm.
And as the clock strikes eight, out they march. What? "I know that. I only wish other people were half as punctual: 'twould save other people's money and other people's peace of mind. You know I hate a black-beetle! No: I don't hate so many things. But I do hate black-beetles, as I hate ill-treatment, Mr. Caudle. And now I have enough of both, goodness knows!
It is true that on the platform the exigencies of his position compel him to indulge in mock-heroics and cut rhetorical capers for which Nature never designed him; but these are for public consumption only, and when he is not playing to the gallery he can discuss his political opponents and their sayings and doings as dispassionately as a microscopist examines a black-beetle.
We can well remember how we were lulled to sleep in earliest days to the following somewhat fearsome and original words sung to the tune of a popular hymn: "Bye, bye, bye, bye, Horse, pig, cow, sheep, Rhinoceros, donkey, cat: Dog, dickie, hippopotamus, Black-beetle, spider, rat." From which it appears evident that the actual words used as a soporific allow considerable latitude of choice.
A native came into hospital only yesterday with his arm all torn and mauled by a leopard, but, though I have walked miles through the jungle, I have seen nothing more fearsome than a black-beetle, and that I might have seen at home. The Santals are very keen shikaris, and go regularly to hunt armed with bows and arrows and a few guns. One morning I watched them start.
For restraint is irksome to all beings, from a black-beetle or an earthworm to an eagle, or, to go higher still in the scale, to an orang-u-tan or a man; it is felt most keenly by the young, in our species at all events, and the British boy suffers the greatest restraint during the period when the call of nature, the instincts of play and adventure, are most urgent.
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