find him lying cold and very still.

So we made more stuff and laid it round each night, and the blackbeetles
from all about the parish swarmed to it. Each night they came in greater
quantities. They fetched up all their friends and relations. Strange
beetles--beetles from other families, with no claim on us whatever--got
to hear about the thing, and came in hordes, and tried to rob our
blackbeetles of it. By the end of a week we had lured into our kitchen
every beetle that wasn't lame for miles round.

MacShaughnassy said it was a good thing. We should clear the suburb at
one swoop. The beetles had now been eating this poison steadily for ten
days, and he said that the end could not be far off. I was glad to hear
it, because I was beginning to find this unlimited hospitality expensive.
It was a dear poison that we were giving them, and they were hearty
eaters.

We went downstairs to see how they were getting on. MacShaughnassy
thought they seemed queer, and was of opinion that they were breaking up.
Speaking for myself, I can only say that a healthier-looking lot of
beetles I never wish to see.

One, it is true, did die that very evening. He was detected in the act
of trying to make off with an unfairly large portion of the poison, and
three or four of the others set upon him savagely and killed him.

But he was the only one, so far as I could ever discover, to whom
MacShaughnassy's recipe proved fatal. As for the others, they grew fat
and sleek upon it. Some of them, indeed, began to acquire quite a
figure. We lessened their numbers eventually by the help of some common