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He saw, to begin with, his old master Andrea Tafi, who had taught him how men win renown by practice of the arts, and whom in return he had befooled again and again, making him mistake for devils of hell a dozen wax tapers pinned on the backs of a lot of great cockroaches, and hoisting him in his bed to the joists of the ceiling, so that the poor old fellow thought he was being carried up to heaven and was in mortal terror.
The soup had defied the stomachs of the whole battery, being strongly impregnated with the peculiar flavor of defunct cockroaches. Shortly before the evacuation of Petersburg, a country boy went hunting. He killed and brought to camp a muskrat. It was skinned, cleaned, buried a day or two, disinterred, cooked, and eaten with great relish. It was splendid.
Mosquitoes tormented him and cockroaches as long as his hand ran over the table; occasionally a land-crab rattled across the room, or a centipede appeared on the open page. But he was accustomed to these embellishments of tropic life, and although he anathematized them and the heat, he went on with his studies.
The necessity for this had not occurred to me, I must confess, and I was making bold to inquire why the two boys could not continue to occupy one room and their sisters another as in the past, when Josephine added, in an awful whisper: "Besides, the house is overrun with cockroaches.
But on his way he had met the cockroach in question, and his desire was held, however, against certain entomologists to prove the cockroaches of the phoraspe species, remarkable for their colors, have very different habits from cockroaches properly so called; he had given himself up to the study, forgetting both that there had been a Captain Hull in command of the "Pilgrim," and that that unfortunate had just perished with his crew.
As to Cousin Benedict, he was no more sick than the American cockroaches which he made his society, and he passed his time in studying, as if he were quietly settled in his study in San Francisco.
I'll send you down your suppers, and you must manage to stow yourselves away in the best manner you can think of for sleep. One of you must needs sit up, and he'll have plenty to do in keeping off the rats and cockroaches, for you'll be somewhat troubled by them, I suspect."
I had great difficulty, however, in supplying them with insect food, for in the Peninsular and Oriental steamers cockroaches were scarce, and it was only by setting traps in the store-rooms, and by hunting an hour every night in the forecastle, that I could secure a few dozen of these creatures, scarcely enough for a single meal.
I fought them with insect powder, and found them comatose in the morning. I was dipping down into the dingy underworld of the contemporary state, and I liked it no better than I did my first dip into it when I stayed with my Uncle Nicodemus Frapp at the bakery at Chatham where, by-the-by, we had to deal with cockroaches of a smaller, darker variety, and also with bugs of sorts.
Dixon, "the globe of Ireland to build over," had elected to bestow its menials in dark and complex basements. Christian and her candle traversed the long maze of underground passages. The smell of past cooking was in the air, the black and evil glitter of cockroaches twinkled on the walls on either hand.
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