FIGHTING THE INSECTS 



and left as speedily as possible. I had not seen him from that 

 day until the Century Dictionary call. 



I worked on the dictionary at odd times until it was completed, 

 and my relations with Coues were extremely pleasant. He was 

 a very extraordinary and very eccentric man. After he married 

 his second wife, he had a beautiful furnished house on N Street, 

 between Seventeenth and Eighteenth, and no matter how late 

 in the evening I called I found him at work in his study, with 

 a coffee-pot and with innumerable cigarette butts scattered about, 

 but always ready for a chat. He pretended to be interested in 

 Spiritualism and was a great friend of Madame Blavatsky. Before 

 he died he told me that his Spiritualism was only a pose, and 

 that he was really slyly investigating Spiritualism and Theosophy, 



As the dictionary approached its close, he went through Scud- 

 der's "Nomenclator Zoologicus," and discovered that the last 

 word was entomological. In great glee he said to me, "You are 

 going to have the honor to define the last word in the English 

 language." I asked him what it was and he told me that it was 

 Zyxomma. It would be difficult to follow that if one were to 

 preserve alphabetic order. I told him that it was the name of a 

 very obscure genus that had no business in the dictionary, and 

 he said that that did not make any difference. "For the honor 

 of Zoology we must have the last word." Curiously enough, two 

 years later. Captain Prince, the librarian of the Patent Office, 

 told me one night that his son had come home from school and 

 told him that his teacher had instructed the class that they must 

 bring in next day the definition of the last word in the English 

 language. The boy asked his father what that word was. The 

 Captain told me that it gave him great joy to tell the boy that 

 he knew the word and that he knew the man who wrote the 

 definition. The boy, undoubtedly, as boys will, told the others the 

 next day in a boy's boasting way that his father knew the man 



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