270 CIMICID^ — BED-BUGS. 



MAY THE 



DESTROYERS OF PEACE 



BE DESTROYED BY US. 



TIFFIN & SON, 



BUG-DESTROYERS TO HER MAJESTY. 



" Our business was formerly carried on in the Strand, 

 where both my father and myself were born ; in fact, I may 

 say I was born to the bug business. 



" I remember my father as well as possible ; indeed, I 

 worked with him for ten or eleven years. He used, when 

 I was a boy, to go out to his work killing bugs at his cus- 

 tomers' houses with a sword by his side and a cocked-hat 

 and bag-wig on his head — in fact, dressed up like a regular 

 dandy, I remember my grandmother, too, when she was 

 in the business, going to the different houses, and seating 

 herself in a chair, and telling the men what they were to 

 do, to clean the furniture and wash the woodwork. 



"I have customers in our books for whom our house has 

 worked these 150 years ; that is, my father and self have 

 worked for them and their fathers. We do the work by 

 contract, examining the house every year. It's a precau- 

 tion to keep the place comfortable. You see, servants are 

 apt to bring bugs in their boxes ; and, though there may 

 be only two or three bugs perhaps hidden in the wood- 

 work and the clothes, yet they soon breed if let alone. 



" We generally go in the spring, before the bugs lay their 

 eggs ; or, if that time passes, it ought to be done before 

 June, before their eggs are hatched, though it's never too 

 late to get rid of a nuisance. 



"I mostly find the bugs in the bedsteads. But, if they 

 are left unmolested, they get numerous and climb to the 

 tops of the rooms, and about the corners of the ceilings. 

 They colonize anywhere they can, though they're very 

 high-minded and prefer lofty places. Where iron bedsteads 

 are used, the bugs are more in the rooms, and that's why 

 such things are bad. They don't keep a bug away from a 

 person sleeping. Bugs'll come if they're thirty yards off. 



''I knew a case of a bug who used to come every night 

 about thirty or forty feet — it was an immense large room — 



