HOUSEHOLD PESTS.
NTIPATHY, and not fear, is, according to Dr. Johnson,
the basis of that horror to which most persons are willing to admit themselves subject in touching, or even seeing, the " noisesome beasts " which in various forms com- bine to form the intruding army which invades the houses of civilised man. One of his acquaintances to whom we are in- troduced in the pages of the " Rambler" was free to confess that he could not see a rat, even when dead, without palpi- tating; and another threw his reputation for courage at the feet of his mistress, unless she could condone the fact that "among all the animals upon which Nature has impressed deformity and horror, there was none that he durst not encounter rather than a beetle." Those who share the feelings of repulsion so magnificently expressed by the great master of Ciceronian English, will not read without a qualm the accounts of the increase in numbers and ferocity of those plagues, great and small, from rats " as big as rabbits " to clothes-moths and cock- roaches, which the Continental weather of the past three months is thought to have engendered. Fleet Street itself has been invaded by armies of starving and thirsty rats, which are said to have left the dry sewers, and taken up their summer quarters within easy reach of the river ; Dublin has suffered from a plague of rats unknown in the memory of man; and in the interval which must elapse before the complete emancipation of Ireland from the upas- tree of English rule, the Lord Mayor has so far sacrificed patriotism to expediency as to employ a Saxon rat-catcher for their extirpation, and rewarded his success with a gratuity, in addition to his stipulated wages. It is high time that the services of this gentleman were secured by his suffering countrymen in London ; for the last and most audacious rat- outrage yet chronicled is reported from a western suburb. A baby, left in a perambulator by the child in charge of it, was attacked by rats issuing from a sewer at Acton, and badly bitten before it could be rescued from these vicious and un- expected enetnies. It is high time that we set our house in order, otherwise our neighbours beyond the Channel may be tempted to see in the sufferings of our middle-class a requital for that last indignity offered to the captive Napoleon at St. Helena, so touchingly described in the " Memorial," when an " irruption de rats, enormes, hardis, et tres mechants " was suffered to deprive the Emperor and his devoted followers in exile of their dejeuner a la fourchette.
"As for rat-catchers," says St. John, "find me an honest one, and I will forfeit my reputation." So far as the writer's experience goes, want of skill, rather than of honesty, is the chief failing of the profession ; though on the sole occasion in which he knew one of the craft to be employed to poison rats in a dwelling-house, a demand for the surrender of the key of the " silver hutch "—East Anglian for the plate-chest—in addi- tion to those of all other rooms and receptacles possessing a lock in which poison might be laid, excited some not unnatural misgivings. He poisoned all the rats, which died under the floors of every room on the ground-floor, and gave employ- ment for weeks to his friend the village joiner in ripping up and replacing planks; and an intermittent crop of dead mice, which by preference chose the hearthstones as a suitable cover- ing for their bodies, gave to the same rooms the aspect of a small pavior's yard at intervals for some months after. On the other hand, the rats, when allowed to resume their old quarters, made an immoderate use of victory. Food, linen, paper, and carpets were devoured ; and screams from the larder from time to time announced the success of the great practical joke, so long familiar to successful rats, of leaping swiftly from a pie-dish when it was wanted for the servants' supper. Though the best that the house afforded was at their dis- posal, they were dainty and capricious in their appetites, taking infinite pains to secure what their fancy suggested might prove new and interesting, either as diet or furniture for their nests ; and the writer, after lying awake for hours listening to the operations of the enemy on a steep flight of stairs and in a wardrobe in the passage above, discovered in the last a couple of hard dumplings, made for the dog's break- fast, which had been carried up the stairs, ana hoisted over a panel two feet high into this ancient piece of furniture. Deliverance came at last, not by human aid, but in the shape of the stable-cat, which thereby won for itself a seat on the hearthrog, and a local reputation which rivalled that of its reputed ancestor owned by Sir Richard Whittington.
The sole virtue of rats in a house is that they drive out the mice. The long-tailed and short-tailed field-mice are chiefly gardeners' pests, eating the mushrooms, store-peas, and bulbs, as well as the sown peas. They never touch any but good bulbs, and the knowing gardener feels a melancholy satisfac- tion when the mice pay marked attention to the stock he has selected. Those whose industry has led them to spend a vacation reading "in College," realise the full burden of the house-mice when all those on the staircase " trek " to the solitary student's room, and make merry on his stores. They, like the rats, have their own sense of humour. A landed pro- prietor of our acquaintance had invented a peculiar form of rent-audit for a set of "small holdings." He chalked a rough
,diagram of the " plots " on a cupboard-shelf, duly labelled with the names of the tenants, and deposited on each the sums paid +an on Lady Day. The little piles of gold or silver were a visible witness to the punctual payment of his tenants ; and among them was one new and crisp £5 note. The mice explored the cupboard also, and abstracted the note, leaving behind one or two small fragments which had been bitten off as samples.
The odious "black-beetle," which is, properly speaking, not o beetle at all, is, like a number of other insect pests, not in- digenous to England, though it is now a " resident alien." The Only use which we ever heard found for black-beetles, was to feed the first birds of paradise brought to England by ship from the Malay Archipelago. No four-footed creature that we know will eat them except the hedgehog, and oats, which are said to be poisoned by them. This is hardly strange, for everything which they touch is contaminated by their re- pulsive odour. Even hedgehogs are a failure, though tradition makes them thrive on cockroaches. An early ambition of the present writer's was to live in a house stocked with black- beetles, in order to keep a hedgehog. At last this came about. The new house swarmed with the insects ; and we had the luck to find a hedgehog in a cow-shed, and brought it home. It would not uncurl in the kitchen, so we put it in a dark cupboard, where there were enough of the creatures to '" feed right a great hog," as the cook, who was disappointed in the animal's size, remarked disparagingly. But the hedge- hog never uncurled. We looked at him night and day, and found beetles running over him, and speculating when they would begin to eat him. At last we carried him to the lawn, where he did move, and walked into the tennis-net, and had to be cut out, to the great destruction of the meshes. Black-beetle killing is a limited but respectable calling in London; and a leading member of the craft sends his card round at intervals to owners of the larger mansions in London, to intimate -that in his opinion the time has come when his services ought to be required in the houses which he has attended during many changes of ownership or occupation. One habit of the beetle, if the observers are correct, itself tends to their des- truction. The eggs are carried under the body of the female, and not dropped at bap-hazard. So that if the creatures are once exterminated, their quarters can only be repeopled by immigrants. On the other hand, it is asserted that the -cockroach "gums " its eggs in cases to the walls. Which of the statements is true, the writer has not yet been able to dis- cover. It will be new to many readers that the mosquito is now firmly established in London. It is to be found in certain large hotels which are the resort of visitors coming from the Continent, and the supply seems to be maintained by constant importations from abroad. Visitors who are familiar with the noise and bite of the mosquito assert that it is the true pest in its worst form, and there is no reason for doubting their experiences. A ludicrous mistake in identity on this point recently occurred at a large colliery in the North of England. The men in a distant part of the mine complained that the workings were full of " mosquitos," and refused to enter the gallery. As it takes something worse than a mosquito to frighten a collier, the manager went down to explore, and discovered, much to his amaze- ment, that the workings were full of huge hornet-like, yellow-banded flies, whose larvae were hatching-out from the wooden props which supported the roof, in the warm atmosphere of the pit. The buzz and rustle of wings was indeed formidable, and the bite of the supposed " mosquitos " would, by analogy, be something very terrible indeed.
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