HOW DOLLY FEARED THEM. 379 



she had helped to rear and tend,, she loved him better than 

 anything on earth besides, excepting perhaps his own child 

 Lucy ; and as the reverend divine and the scholar to her, as it 

 seemed, of most stupendous learning she looked up to him as 

 a being almost of superior order. Things which lie thought 

 worthy of so much notice could not be other than important 

 in her sight ; and his attention at times to insects his keeping 

 them alive and dead his bulky books and fine pictures in 

 which they figured above all, his sometimes, as Caleb in con- 

 fidence had told her, writing about them, and sending what he 

 wrote to men, learned like himself, in London, these facts not 

 only magnified in her esteem the most undreaded of the insect 

 crew, but enlarged, in proportion, all the fearful fancies with 

 which, from early days, her imagination, the apt disciple of 

 ignorance, had learnt to invest a certain few amongst its darker 

 members. We have seen, already, the foundation of her spe- 

 cial abhorrence of the common cockroach, known better as 

 the black beetle of the kitchen, when, a young girl fresh from 

 the country, she found a living burial in the family of a London 

 undertaker. Who can wonder that they became from that 

 time objects not less redoubted than the death-watch or the 

 ticking spider, and opposed to her favourite crickets as dark 

 malignant goblins to bright fairies or good spirits, as defilers 

 and destroyers of all household amenities to their encouragers 

 and preservers, as forerunners and foretellers of evil, to har- 

 bingers and promoters of good ? 



