How many big wasps came out that day it is impossible to guess. There
are at least fifty accounts of their apparition. There was one victim, a
grocer, who discovered one of these monsters in a sugar-cask and very
rashly attacked it with a spade as it rose. He struck it to the ground
for a moment, and it stung him through the boot as he struck at it
again and cut its body in half. He was first dead of the two....

The most dramatic of the fifty appearances was certainly that of the
wasp that visited the British Museum about midday, dropping out of the
blue serene upon one of the innumerable pigeons that feed in the
courtyard of that building, and flying up to the cornice to devour its
victim at leisure. After that it crawled for a time over the museum
roof, entered the dome of the reading-room by a skylight, buzzed about
inside it for some little time--there was a stampede among the
readers--and at last found another window and vanished again with a
sudden silence from human observation.

Most of the other reports were of mere passings or descents. A picnic
party was dispersed at Aldington Knoll and all its sweets and jam
consumed, and a puppy was killed and torn to pieces near Whitstable
under the very eyes of its mistress....

The streets that evening resounded with the cry, the newspaper placards
gave themselves up exclusively in the biggest of letters to the
"Gigantic Wasps in Kent." Agitated editors and assistant editors ran up
and down tortuous staircases bawling things about "wasps." And Professor
Redwood, emerging from his college in Bond Street at five, flushed from
a heated discussion with his committee about the price of bull calves,
bought an evening paper, opened it, changed colour, forgot about bull
calves and committee forthwith, and took a hansom headlong for