Why not an earwig, or a black-beetle, or a wood-louse, or a centipede? There are lots of insects more offensive than the grasshopper, and personally I would much rather be called a grasshopper than an earwig, which gets into people’s sponges and frightens them to death. Perhaps he had been reading that nice passage in the Prophet Nahum: “Thy captains are as the great grasshoppers, which camp in the hedges in the cold day, but when the sun ariseth they flee away, and their place is not known where they are,” or the one in Ecclesiastes: “And the grasshopper shall be a burden.” I do not know. On the other hand, the _Encyclopædia_ has a suggestive sentence: “All grasshoppers are vegetable feeders and have an incomplete metamorphosis, so that _their destructive powers are continuous from the moment of emergence from the egg until death_.” Little Bits of London I THE SUPREME COURT Among those curious corners of London life which anyone may go to see but nobody does, one of the most curious, and (for about five minutes) interesting, is the House of Lords sitting as the Supreme Court of Appeal. It is one of the ordinary things which go on and on unnoticed for a lifetime because they have gone on so long, till one day one begins to think about them and realizes suddenly that they were really extraordinary all the time--just as one pronounces sometimes with a startling sense of its absurdity some common English word. But no sight-seer, no student of our institutions, and particularly no one who is interested in the ways and customs of individual trades, should fail to visit the Supreme Appellate Tribunal of this great country. The funny thing about the House of Lords sitting as a court is that it actually sits in the House of Lords. Entering the great red chamber--as anybody may do if he can find the way--one receives the impression that it is perfectly empty, save for the knot of barristers’ clerks, solicitors’ clerks, pressmen and casual onlookers who are huddled round the entrance. Beyond them are miles, and miles, and miles of red leather benches, silent, mournful, untenanted, dead. But no! A low monotonous drone reaches you--like the voice of a priest intoning at the other end of a cathedral. Guided by this sound you discover faint traces of life on one of the vast red benches. There is an old man sitting on the bench, a pleasant, bearded old man; he does not look at all legal, and he is dressed in every-day clothes, huddled up in front of a sort of small card-table covered with huge tomes. He is speaking apparently into space--in a kind of squeaky hum, if you can imagine the sound--fumbling all the time with the large brown tomes.