s at least
willing that we should learn if we can.

XI

The Beetle

How strange it is that sometimes the smallest and commonest incident,
that has befallen one a hundred times before, will suddenly open the
door into that shapeless land of fruitless speculation; the land on to
which, I think, the Star Wormwood fell, burning it up and making it
bitter; the land in which we most of us sometimes have to wander, and
always alone.

It was such a trifling thing after all. I was bicycling very
pleasantly down a country road to-day, when one of those small pungent
beetles, a tiny thing, in black plate-armour, for all the world like a
minute torpedo, sailed straight into my eye. The eyelid, quicker even
than my own thought, shut itself down, but too late. The little fellow
was engulphed in what Walt Whitman would call the liquid rims. These
small, hard creatures are tenacious of life, and they have, moreover,
the power of exuding a noxious secretion--an acrid oil, with a strong
scent, and even taste, of saffron. It was all over in a moment. I
rubbed my eye, and I suppose crushed him to death; but I could not get
him out, and I had no companion to extract him; the result was that my
eye was painful and inflamed for an hour or two, till the tiny, black,
flattened corpse worked its way out for itself.

Now, that is not a very marvellous incident; but it set me wondering.
In the first place, what a horrible experience for the creature; in a
moment, as he sailed joyfully along, saying, "Aha," perhaps, like the
war-horse among the trumpets, on the scented summer breeze, with the
sun warm on his mail, to find himself stuck fast in a hot and oozy
crevice, and presently to be crushed to death. His little taste of the
pleasant world so soon over, and for me an agreeable hour spoilt, so
far as I could see, to no particular purpose.

Now, one is inclined to believe that such an incident is what we call
fortuitous; but the only hope we have in the world is to believe that
things do not happen by chance. One believes, or tries to believe,
that the Father of all has room in his mind for the smallest of his
creatures; that not a sparrow, as Christ said, falls to the ground
without his tender care. Theologians tell us that death entered into
the world by sin; but it is not consistent to believe that, whereas
both men and animals suffer and die, the sufferings and death of men
are caused by their sins, or by the sins of the