98 The Book of Bugs. 



you tried it, and it worked like a charm. Just keep me 

 out of it, please.) 



This true domestic animal,, found nowhere else than in 

 man's houses (though perhaps it is a cousin that boards 

 with the pigeons), has acquired the convenient power of 

 subsisting almost indefinitely without eating. It does 

 not like to do so, for it often deserts houses that are too 

 long vacant and moves to where things are a little livelier 

 and it can get a bite occasionally. Once the migration 

 gets started, it sometimes continues for months. How- 

 ever, houses long empty of tenants, or deserted camps in 

 the woods, are soon found by newcomiers to be all alive 

 with them, ready and even anxious to resume business 

 at the old stand. What they have done in the meantime 

 is simply to wait. It takes five meals to see them from 

 the chick to the mature fowl. They eat, and it swells 

 them so their clothes rip open. Never mind. They 

 have another one on underneath and they step out, all 

 ready for Easter. If they don't get a meal they don't get 

 any older. One specimen has been kept in a bottle for 

 a year without food and at last reports was enjoying 

 reasonable health. It is as if you, Master Willie, were to 

 continue to be only ten years old the rest of your life, 

 provided you took the pledge against eating. The female 

 lays her tiny eggs (from six to fifty is considered a 

 clutch) and in eight days they hatch and push off the self- 

 sealing lids. There are no violent transformations, as 

 in the case of other insects. The delicate yellowish infant 

 grows only darker with its five meals and five molts, 

 except that at the last it puts on wing-pads to show that 

 though now it seeks safety by hiding (and it is a mighty 

 small crack it cannot get into), there was a time ages ago 

 when it flew. To make the proof still stronger, there are 

 occasional freaks, reversions to type, that fly, and they 



