Nut-weevil
a, view from above; b, side view; line shows natural size.
The weevil was placed in a paper cornucopia together with some pierced hazelnuts, and in his first spare moment Louis hastened to Uncle Paul’s house, his cheeks flushed with excitement. Little Louis was very fond of hazelnuts, and to catch in the very act the insect that attacks them was a very serious matter, to his thinking. In the evening Uncle Paul had his usual audience around him to listen to his account of the hazelnut-weevil.
“Here is the little insect Louis has caught,” he began. “Look at its beak a moment.”
“What a nose!” exclaimed Emile. “Oh, what a nose! It is as slender as a hair and very long and turned back at the end.” [[322]]
“Doesn’t it look as if it were smoking a long pipe, as I said the other day?” asked Louis.
“See, Uncle,” Emile pointed out, “how close together its eyes are; they almost touch each other, and the insect seems to be squinting. How funny it is, with its nose like a pipe-stem and its squinting eyes!”
“Where is its mouth?” asked Jules.
“At the very end of what Emile calls its long nose,” his uncle replied.
“How does it manage to eat? Food must have a hard time getting through that stem not so big around as a thread.”