glass
cases with pins stuck through them; but to find cockroaches in your boots
and centipedes in your bed is rather too much of a good thing.'

'Well,' said Dugald, laughing, 'you'll get used to even that. I don't
really mind now what bites me or what crawls over me. Besides, you know
all those creepie-creepies, as you call them, afford one so excellent an
opportunity of studying natural history from the life.'

'Oh, bother such life, Dugald! My dear cousin, I would rather remain in
blissful ignorance of natural history all my life than have even an earwig
reposing under my pillow. Besides, I notice that even your Yahoo
servants--'

'I beg your pardon, cousin; Gaucho, not Yahoo.'

'Well, well, Gaucho servants shudder, and even run from our common bedroom
creepies.'

'Oh! they are nothing at all to go by, Archie. They think because a thing
is not very pretty it is bound to be venomous.'

'But does not the bite of a centipede mean death?'

'Oh dear no. It isn't half as bad as London vermin.'

'Then there are scorpions. Do they kill you? Is not their bite highly
dangerous?'

'Not so bad as a bee's sting.'

'Then there are so many flying beetles.'

'Beauties, Archie, beauties. Why, Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed
like some of these.'

'Perhaps not. But then, Solomon or not Solomon, how am I to know which
sting and which don't?'

'_Experientia docet_, Archie.'

Archie shuddered.

'Again, there are spiders. Oh, they do frighten me. They're as big as
lobsters. Ugh!'

'Well, they won't hurt. They help to catch the other things!'

'Yes, and that's just the worst of it. First a lot of creepies come in to
suck your blood and inject poison into your veins, to say nothing of half
scaring a fellow to death; and then a whole lot of flying creepies, much
worse than the former, come in to hunt them up; and bats come next, to say
nothing of lizards; and what with the buzzing and singing and hopping and
flapping and beating and thumping, poor _me_ has to lie awake half the
night, falling asleep towards morning to dream I'm in purgatory.'

'Poor _you_ indeed!' said Dugald.

'You have told me, too, I must sleep in the dark, but I want to know what
is the good of that when about one half of those flying creepies carry a
lamp each, and some of them two. Only the night before last I awoke in a
fright. I had been dreaming about the great sea-serpent, and the first
thing I saw was a huge creature about as lon