THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



without paying another fare. It deHghted my companion to 

 find that we had crossed back and forth on the single fare, and 

 so we stayed on the boat for several hours, going across the river 

 and back again. I don't think that he saved enough money to 

 pay for the dinner that night, but we had a long and interesting 

 conversation. Among other things we talked about the Bible. 

 He was a Bible student and said that he understood all the 

 texts perfectly. I remarked to him, "How would you explain 

 the one that goes 'Ye are the salt of the earth. Now if the salt 

 hath lost its savor, wherewithal shall it be salted?'" 



"Why," he said, "that's very simple. Suppose that you and a 

 lot of other chaps were the aristocracy of a certain country. If 

 you were not perfectly moral and upright, and all that sort of 

 thing, what the deuce would become of the country?" 



It was a wonderful experience for me, and with all of his 

 apparent eccentricities I admired the Englishman greatly. When 

 he had to go on to Mexico he asked me to go with him, but 

 I had my work to do in Louisiana, and this, together with the 

 fact that there was to be a change of administration in Wash- 

 ington, made me think it wise to decline. I gave him a letter 

 of introduction to a classmate of mine who had taken a minor 

 engineering job in the City of Mexico, and he acted as the 

 Englishman's secretary for a few weeks after his arrival. 



Then I went into the Bayou Teche country to a large sugar 

 plantation, the owner of which had appealed to Washington 

 for help against a beede (Ligyrus) that was boring into the 

 bases of the cane stalks. I found that I had known the son of 

 the planter at Cornell. He was W. J. Thompson of the class of 

 1875. His father, an austere, bearded man, had come from 

 Chicago, and had bought this big plantation on the Teche. He 

 told me that in those days (possibly it is so now) sugar planting 

 was something of a gamble. Two years out of three the crop 



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