The Aristocrat of the Kitchen. 117 



The ingenuity of man from the earliest ages has been 

 directed to the construction of cockroach traps. Getting 

 a roach into a place where there is something to eat is 

 easy enough; getting him to stay there till you can come 

 and kill him is another matter. Putting molasses on a 

 piece of board afloat in a broad basin is said to be a great 

 success. I doubt it, for it is my experience that a cock- 

 roach is hard to drown. lie does not throw up his six 

 hands at once and sink bubbling to the bottom. I sup- 

 pose eventually he does drown, but I have never had the 

 patience to wait and see. I have found that the least little 

 kerosene on the water has the effect of instantly killing 

 him. 



Another trap is a glazed bowl half full of stale beer or 

 ale their pledge allows them to drink malt liquors- 

 with a lot of sticks leaned up against it and projecting 

 over the liquid. They drop in and drown themselves and, 

 presumably, their sorrows, in the flowing bowl. There 

 are other traps, all depending on the fact that the roach 

 cannot climb up glazed surfaces, boxes with glass rings 

 around a hole in the top, and the like. But the trap is a 

 niggling kind of warfare at best. It lacks breadth of 

 scope and action. There is nothing whole-souled and 

 generous about it. Then, too, it defeats its own ends in 

 the long run, for the "wise cockroaches that shake their 

 heads and say, " \Yell, I don't know about that; guess I'll 

 be just as well off if I keep away," are preserved, and the 

 heedless exterminated, so that the race tends to become 

 warier and warier, and we bequeath to posterity yet un- 

 born a household pest that no trap can allure, be it ever 

 so tempting. The cockroach of to-day is plenty smart 

 enough. 



Destructive agencies that fall alike upon the wise and 

 the unwise are quicklime and Persian powder, blown into 



