I should be
very certain that I had said nothing of much significance, if they
did not.
Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat
stone, which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found
it, with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round
it, close to its edges,--and have you not, in obedience to a kind
of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough,
insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge
and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says to
herself, "It's done brown enough by this time"? What an odd
revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a
small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected,
until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced
by your turning the old stone over! Blades of grass flattened
down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and
ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or
horny-shelled,--turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them
softer, but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine
watches; (Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a
joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat-
pattern five timekeepers to slide into it;) black, glossy crickets,
with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse
stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae,
perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the
infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner is the stone turned
and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded
community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the
luxury of legs--and some of them have a good many--rush round
wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in
a general stampede for underground retreats from the region
poisoned by sunshine.
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