HOW DOLLY FEARED THEM. 379 



childhood 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 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 confidence had told her, writing about them, and 

 sending what he wrote to men, learned like himself, in Lon- 

 don, 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 imagina- 

 tion, the apt disciple of ignorance, had learnt to invest a cer- 

 tain few amongst its darker members. We have seen, already, 

 the foundation of her special abhorrence of the common cock- 

 roach, 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 fai- 

 ries or good spirits, as defilers and destroyers of all household 

 amenities to their encouragers and preservers, as forerunners 

 and foretellers of evil, to harbingers and promoters of good ? 



