"It isn't that I dislike dogs at all," answered Benedict; "but this creature has disappointed me."
"How do you mean? You could hardly want to catalogue him with the diptera or hymenoptera?" asked Mrs Weldon laughingly.
"Oh, not at all," replied Benedict, with the most unmoved gravity. "But I understood that he had been found on the West Coast of Africa, and I hoped that perhaps he might have brought over some African hemiptera in his coat; but I have searched his coat well, over and over again, without finding a single specimen. The dog has disappointed me," he repeated mournfully.
"I can only hope," said the captain, "that if you had found anything, you were going to kill it instantly."
Benedict looked with mute astonishment into the captain's face. In a moment or two afterwards, he said,-
"I suppose, sir, you acknowledge that Sir John Franklin was an eminent member of your profession?"
"Certainly; why?"
"Because Sir John would never take away the life of the most insignificant insect; it is related of him that when he had once been incessantly tormented all day by a mosquito, at last he found it on the back of his hand and blew it off, saying, 'Fly away, little creature, the world is large enough for both you and me!' "
"That little anecdote of yours, Mr. Benedict," said the captain, smiling, "is a good deal older than Sir John Franklin. It is told, in nearly the same words, about Uncle Toby, in Sterne's 'Tristram Shandy'; only there it was not a mosquito, it was a common fly."
"And was Uncle Toby an entomologist?" asked Benedict; "did he ever really live?"