“We don’t care to say how many boxes we sell in the year; but we can tell you, sir, that we sell more for beetle poisoning in the summer than in the winter, as a matter of course. When we find that a particular district uses almost an equal quantity all the year round, we make sure that that is a rat district; for where there is not the heat of summer to breed beetles, it must follow that the people wish to get rid of rats.
“Brixton, Hackney, Ball’s Pond, and Lower Road, Islington, are the places that use most of our paste, those districts lying low, and being consequently damp. Camden Town, though it is in a high situation, is very much infested with beetles; it is a clayey soil, you understand, which retains moisture, and will not allow it to filter through like gravel. This is why in some very low districts, where the houses are built on gravel, we sell scarcely any of our paste.
“As the farmers say, a good fruit year is a good fly year; so we say, a good dull, wet summer, is a good beetle summer; and this has been a very fertile year, and we only hope it will be as good next year.
“We don’t believe in rat-destroyers; they profess to kill with weasels and a lot of things, and sometimes even say they can charm them away. Captains of vessels, when they arrive in the docks, will employ these people; and, as we say, they generally use our composition, but as long as their vessels are cleared of the vermin, they don’t care to know how it is done. A man who drives about in a cart, and does a great business in this way, we have reason to believe uses a great quantity of our Phosphor Paste. He comes from somewhere down the East-end or Whitechapel way.
“Our prices are too high for the street-sellers. Your street-seller can only afford to sell an article made by a person in but a very little better position than himself. Even our small boxes cost at the trade price two shillings a dozen, and when sold will only produce three shillings; so you can imagine the profit is not enough for the itinerant vendor.
“Bakers don’t use much of our paste, for they seem to think it no use to destroy the vermin—beetles and bakers’ shops generally go together.”
Crickets.
The house-cricket may perhaps be deemed a still more annoying insect than the common cockroach, adding an incessant noise to its ravages. Though it may not be unpleasant to hear for a short time “the cricket chirrup in the hearth,” so constant a din every evening must greatly interrupt comfort and conversation.
These garrulous animals, which live in a kind of artificial torrid zone, are very thirsty souls, and are frequently found drowned in pans of water, milk, broth, and the like. Whatever is moist, even stockings or linen hung out to dry, is to them a bonne bouche; they will eat the skimmings of pots, yeast, crumbs of bread, and even salt, or anything within their reach. Sometimes they are so abundant in houses as to become absolute pests, flying into the candles and even into people’s faces.—(Kirby and Spence’s Ent. i. 206, 7.)
The house-cricket (Acheta domestica) is well known for its habit of picking out the mortar of ovens and fire-places, where it not only enjoys warmth, but can procure abundance of food. It is usually supposed that it feeds on bread. M. Latreille says it only eats insects, and it certainly thrives well in houses infested by the cockroach; but we have also known it eat and destroy lamb’s-wool stockings, and other woollen stuffs, hung near a fire to dry. Although the food of crickets consists chiefly of vegetable substances, they exhibit a propensity to carnivorous habits. The house-cricket thrives best in the vicinity of a baker’s oven, where there are plenty of bread crumbs.