“I never heard of any but one man who seriously went to work selling bug poison in the streets. I was told by some persons that he was selling a first-rate thing, and I spent several days to find him out. But, after all, his secret proved to be nothing at all. It was train-oil, linseed and hempseed, crushed up all together, and the bugs were to eat it till they burst.
“After all, secrets for bug-poisons ain’t worth much, for all depends upon the application of them. For instance, it is often the case that I am sent for to find out one bug in a room large enough for a school. I’ve discovered it when the creature had been three or four months there, as I could tell by his having changed his jacket so often—for bugs shed their skins, you know. No, there was no reason that he should have bred; it might have been a single gentleman or an old maid.
“A married couple of bugs will lay from forty to fifty eggs at one laying. The eggs are oval, and are each as large as the thirty-second part of an inch; and when together are in the shape of a caraway comfit, and of a bluish-white colour. They’ll lay this quantity of eggs three times in a season. The young ones are hatched direct from the egg, and, like young partridges, will often carry the broken eggs about with them, clinging to their back. They get their fore-quarters out, and then they run about before the other legs are completely cleared.
“As soon as the bugs are born they are of a cream colour, and will take to blood directly; indeed, if they don’t get it in two or three days they die; but after one feed they will live a considerable time without a second meal. I have known old bugs to be frozen over in a horse-pond—when the furniture has been thrown in the water—and there they have remained for a good three weeks; still, after they have got a little bit warm in the sun’s rays they have returned to life again.
“I have myself kept bugs for five years and a half without food, and a housekeeper at Lord H——’s informed me that an old bedstead that I was then moving from a store-room was taken down forty-five years ago, and had not been used since, but the bugs in it were still numerous, though as thin as living skeletons. They couldn’t have lived upon the sap of the wood, it being worm-eaten and dry as a bone.
“A bug will live for a number of years, and we find that when bugs are put away in old furniture without food, they don’t increase in number; so that, according to my belief, the bugs I just mentioned must have existed forty-five years: besides, they were large ones, and very dark-coloured, which is another proof of age.
“It is a dangerous time for bugs when they are shedding their skins, which they do about four times in the course of a year; then they throw off their hard shell and have a soft coat, so that the least touch will kill them; whereas, at other times they will take a strong pressure. I have plenty of bug-skins, which I keep by me as curiosities, of all sizes and colours, and sometimes I have found the young bugs collected inside the old ones’ skins for warmth, as if they had put on their father’s great-coat. There are white bugs—albinoes you may call ’em—freaks of nature like.”
Black-Beetles.
Cockroaches are even more voracious than crickets. A small species (Blatta Lapponica, Linn.), occasionally met with about London, is said to swarm numerously in the huts of the Laplanders, and will sometimes, in conjunction with a carrion-beetle (Silpha Lapponica, Linn.), devour, we are told, in a single day, their whole store of dried fish.
In London, and many other parts of the country, cockroaches, originally introduced from abroad, have multiplied so prodigiously as to be a great nuisance. They are often so numerous in kitchens and lower rooms in the metropolis as literally to cover the floor, and render it impossible for them to move, except over each other’s bodies. This, indeed, only happens after dark, for they are strictly night insects, and the instant a candle is intruded upon the assembly they rush towards their hiding-places, so that in a few seconds not one of the countless multitude is to be seen.