For suppose not, gentle reader, that Squinado went alone; in his train were more than a hundred thousand as good as he, each in his office, and as cheaply paid; who needed no cumbrous baggage train of force-pumps, hose, chloride of lime packets, whitewash, pails or brushes, but were every man his own instrument; and, to save expense of transit, just grew on Squinado’s back. Do you doubt the assertion? Then lift him up hither, and putting him gently into that shallow jar of salt water, look at him through the hand-magnifier, and see how Nature is maxima in minimis. There he sits, twiddling his feelers (a substitute, it seems, with crustacea for biting their nails when they are puzzled), and by no means lovely to look on in vulgar eyes;—about the bigness of a man’s fist; a round-bodied, spindle-shanked, crusty, prickly, dirty fellow, with a villanous squint, too, in those little bony eyes, which never look for a moment both the same way. Never mind: many a man of genius is ungainly enough; and Nature, if you will observe, as if to make up to him for his uncomeliness, has arrayed him as Solomon in all his glory never was arrayed, and so fulfilled one of the proposals of old Fourier—that scavengers, chimney-sweeps, and other workers in disgusting employments, should be rewarded for their self-sacrifice in behalf of the public weal by some peculiar badge of honour, or laurel crown. Not that his crown, like those of the old Greek games, is a mere useless badge; on the contrary, his robe of state is composed of his fellow-servants. His whole back is covered with a little grey forest of branching hairs, fine as a spider’s web, each branchlet carrying its little pearly ringed club, each club its rose-coloured polype, like (to quote Mr. Gosse’s comparison) the unexpanded birds of the acacia. {181a}