A NEW LOCUST.
CIV.—I am glad, with all my heart, that you have him secure, for I delight to gaze on the wonders of nature, even of the destructive kinds. You shall show me your new locust. Of course you thrusted a pin through the body, and fixed it down to a cork after the manner of the entomologists.
SYL.—No, truly; for it knocked me down after the manner of the pugilists, and so made its escape.
CIV.—How! be they so huge, then? To my fancy, they seem more like flying dragons than locusts.
SYL.—It is true, notwithstanding. Some of them which I have seen, measured nearly six feet in length; others, that were younger, from three to five. One of these last, the Minimi, or small fry, I likewise took captive, though not without some shrewd kicking and biting, and striking with its fore-paws.
CIV.—The smallest of animals will do so to escape from bondage. I take for granted you knocked him on the head, for the sake of peace.
SYL.—No, indeed. I had not the heart; the visage was so strangely human, ape or monkey could not look more like a man in the face; and then it cried and whined for all the world like a mere boy.
CIV.—It would have been a kind of petty murder to slay him. I do not think I could commit Monkeycide myself. They look, as Lady Macbeth says, so like our Fathers. To kill an ape would plant the whole stings of an apiary in my conscience. I pray you go on with the description.
SYL.—Willingly, and according to the system of the great Linnæus. Antennæ or horns he had none, thus differing from the common locust, but in lieu thereof, sundry bunches and tufts of coarse red hair; eyes brown, and tending inwards towards the proboscis or snout. Two fore-legs or arms terminating in ten palpi or feelers, and the same number of toes or claws on the hinder feet. On grasping truncus, or the trunk, it was cased in a loose skin resembling corduroy, the same being most curiously furnished with sundry bags or pouches, into which, like the provident pelican, it stuffed the forage it had collected from the trees.
CIV.—With submission, Sylvanus, to your better judgment, I should have taken this same Locust, from your description, to have been actually a mere human boy.