IX
I ignored the verdict. I addressed the prisoners very severely and sentenced them to do the Chasm hole from 6.0 a.m. to 6.0 p.m. every day for a week, to take out cards and play out every stroke. “You, Winthrop,” I said, “with your gentlemanly cunning, your subtle pretensions of righteousness——” But there is no space for that....
X
As a matter of fact the jury were quite right. In company with a lady who shall be nameless I did do it. At least, at one time I thought I did. Only we have proved so often that somebody else did it, we have shown so conclusively that we can’t have done it, that we find ourselves wondering if we really did.
Perhaps we didn’t.
If we did we apologize to all concerned—except, of course, to Mr. Winthrop. I suspect him.
The Grasshopper
THE Animal Kingdom may be divided into creatures which one can feed and creatures which one cannot feed. Animals which one cannot feed are nearly always unsatisfactory; and the grasshopper is no exception. Anyone who has tried feeding a grasshopper will agree with me.
Yet he is one of the most interesting of British creatures. The Encyclopædia Britannica is as terse and simple as ever about him. “Grasshoppers,” it says, “are specially remarkable for their saltatory powers, due to the great development of the hind legs; and also for their stridulation, which is not always an attribute of the male only.” To translate, grasshoppers have a habit of hopping (“saltatory powers”) and chirping (“stridulation”).
It is commonly supposed that the grasshopper stridulates by rubbing his back legs together; but this is not the case. For one thing I have tried it myself and failed to make any kind of noise; and for another, after exhaustive observations, I have established the fact that, though he does move his back legs every time he stridulates, his back legs do not touch each other. Now it is a law of friction that you cannot have friction between two back legs if the back legs are not touching; in other words, the grasshopper does not rub his legs together to produce stridulation, or, to put it quite shortly, he does not rub his back legs together at all. I hope I have made this point quite clear. If not, a more detailed treatment will be found in the Paper which I read to the Royal Society in 1912.