The Wicked Flea. 65 



their skin a few times they spin a little cocoon and then 

 hop out with no taste whatever for dust, but a thirst for 

 blood that a tiger cannot hope to equal. From egg to 

 perfect flea is about four weeks. Careful sweeping will 

 gather up a lot of grubs, but the mature flea is a hardy 

 plant. Sometimes a plentiful application of insect powder 

 all over the house will stupefy them long enough to sweep 

 them up and burn them. Sometimes not. Sometimes 

 benzine sprinkled all about will kill them all off and some- 

 times not. Taking up all the mattings and scrubbing the 

 floors with scalding hot soapsuds with kerosene in it is 

 good too. Every summer the newspapers print a para- 

 graph about putting a piece of raw meat in the middle 

 of a sheet of sticky fly-paper to catch fleas. It makes 

 interesting reading and tends to make the column come 

 out even at the bottom, but it does not work for a cent. 

 The best way is to give away the cat and make the dog 

 stay out of the house. 



There is a very touching story about the mamma flea 

 feeding her young with drops of blood. I should think 

 this would make as fine a design for ecclesiastical em- 

 broidery as the equally true story that the pelican wounds 

 her own breast for her children's nourishment. That is 

 the worst of these emblems. A good part of the time 

 they are founded on what isn't so. The mother pelican 

 does not feed her young with her own blood, and the 

 mother flea does not feed her young with anybody's else's 

 blood. The mother flea does not care two pins about her 

 young. She cannot be tied down with the care of children. 

 She has a career of her own. I must exempt from this 

 charge the jigger flea, or chigoe, of the warm climates. 

 When the female feels the instinct of motherhood w r ithin 

 her she does not merely bite, she burrows under the skin 

 of somebody and swells up there to the bigness of a pea 



