132 The Book of Bugs. 



inch long, with tufts of dark brown hair sticking- out over 

 it. it somehow looks like a buffalo, though it is not a 

 moth, but a beetle, with its black, hard wing-case cov- 

 ered with tiny scales that give it a marbled look. Dis- 

 turb it, and it tries to convey the impression that the 

 nervous shock has been too much for its weak heart. It 

 dies, right then and there. But it is only " possuming." 

 By and by, when it thinks you are not looking, off it flies 

 into the garden, where it shows its respectable origin by 

 sucking the honey from the spiraea, milfoil, and the dif- 

 ferent kinds of snapdragons. It, too, has a cousin in the 

 business, whose larva has an ugly plume of black hairs 

 on its tail. It eats carpets, too, but rather prefers feather- 

 beds and pillows, whose contents it most neatly felts. 



Do not think that because these gentry are, compara- 

 tively speaking, new to the trade they are easily to be 

 discouraged. Far from it. The carpets must be taken 

 up, thoroughly beaten, sprayed out-of-doors with ben- 

 zine, and allowed to air for several hours. The rooms 

 infested must be carefully cleaned, scalded with boiling 

 water, and the cracks flooded with kerosene or benzine. 



If the cracks in the floor are pretty wide, better fill 

 them up with liquid plaster-of-paris. If the buffalo still 

 persists, lay a damp cloth smoothly over the carpet and 

 iron it with a hot iron. The steam kills the insects im- 

 mediately beneath. 



In the fight with the clothes-moth the greatest chance 

 of defeat is in trusting to the new-fangled wisdom that 

 relies on cedar chests, camphor, tobacco, moth-balls, and 

 chemists' devices. Noah's wife probably practiced the 

 policy of shaking, brushing, beating, and exposure to 

 the sunlight and air, and in all these years it has not been 

 improved upon much. (That is, after she got out of the 

 ark. If she was any kind of a housekeeper she must 



