indifferent to fleas, but there have been none who loved them, though
if my memory does not betray me there was a famous French prisoner
some years ago who beguiled the tedium of his cell by making a pet and
a performer of a flea. For the world at large, the flea represents
merely hateful irritation. Mr W.B. Yeats has introduced it into poetry
in this sense in an epigram addressed "to a poet who would have me
praise certain bad poets, imitators of his and of mine":

You say as I have often given tongue
In praise of what another's said or sung,
'Twere politic to do the like by these,
But where's the wild dog that has praised his fleas?

When we think of the sufferings of human beings and animals at the
hands--if that is the right word--of insects, we feel that it is
pardonable enough to make faces at creatures so inconsiderate. But
what strikes one as remarkable is that the insects that do man most
harm are not those that horrify him most. A lady who will sit bravely
while a wasp hangs in the air and inspects first her right and then
her left temple will run a mile from a harmless spider. Another will
remain collected (though murderous) in presence of a horse-fly, but
will shudder at sight of a moth that is innocent of blood. Our fears,
it is evident, do not march in all respects with our sense of physical
danger. There are insects that make us feel that we are in presence of
the uncanny. Many of us have this feeling about moths. Moths are the
ghosts of the insect world. It may be the manner in which they flutter
in unheralded out of the night that terrifies us. They seem to tap
against our lighted windows as though the outer darkness had a message
for us. And their persistence helps to terrify. They are more
troublesome than a subject nation. They are more importunate than the