h her.

Mrs. Weldon was absolutely ignorant of the fate that awaited her.
Harris and Negoro had not addressed a word to her during the whole
journey from the Coanza to Kazounde. Since her arrival, she had not
seen either of them again, and she could not leave the enclosure
around the rich trader's private establishment. Is it necessary to
say now that Mrs. Weldon had found no help in her large child, Cousin
Benedict? That is understood.

When the worthy savant learned that he was not on the American
continent, as he believed, he was not at all anxious to know how that
could have happened. No! His first movement was a gesture of anger.
The insects that he imagined he had been the first to discover in
America, those _tsetses_ and others, were only mere African hexapodes,
found by many naturalists before him, in their native places.
Farewell, then, to the glory of attaching his name to those
discoveries! In fact, as he was in Africa, what could there be
astonishing in the circumstance that Cousin Benedict had collected
African insects.

But the first anger over, Cousin Benedict said to himself that the
"Land of the Pharaohs"--so he still called it--possessed incomparable
entomological riches, and that so far as not being in the "Land of the
Incas" was concerned, he would not lose by the change.

"Ah!" he repeated, to himself, and even repeated to Mrs. Weldon, who
hardly listened to him, "this is the country of the _manticores_,
those coleopteres with long hairy feet, with welded and sharp
wing-shells, with enormous mandibles, of which the most remarkable is
the tuberculous _manticore_. It is the country of the _calosomes_ with
golden ends; of the Goliaths of Guinea and of the Gabon, whose feet
are furnished with thorns; of the sacred Egyptian _ateuchus_, that
the Egyptians of Upper Egypt venerated as gods. It is here that those
sphinxes with heads of death, now spread over all Europe, belong, and
also those 'Idias Bigote,' whose sting is particularly dreaded by the
Senegalians of the coast. Yes; there are superb things to be found
here, and I shall find them, if these honest people will only let me."

We know who those "honest people" were, of whom Cousin Benedict
did not dream of complaining. Besides, it has been stated, the
entomologist had enjoyed a half liberty in Negoro's and Harris's
company, a liberty of which Dick Sand had absolutely deprived him
during the voyage from the coast to the Coanza. The simple-hear