English literature -- History and criticism; Literature, Modern -- History and criticism
But what is this crowd gathered round the door of the George Hotel in
Chepstow? A faint cheer rises from the bottom of the hill. Up comes the
mail coach, horses steaming, panels mud-splashed. “Make way! Make way!”
cries the ostler and the vehicle dashes into the courtyard, pulls up
sharp before the door. Down jumps the coachman, the horses are led off,
and a fine team of spanking greys is harnessed with incredible speed in
their stead. Upon all this—coachman, horses, coach, and passengers—the
crowd looked with gaping admiration every Wednesday evening all through
the year. But to-day, the twelfth of March, 1852, as the coachman
settled his rug, and stretched his hands for the reins, he observed that
instead of being fixed upon him, the eyes of the people of Chepstow
darted this way and that. Heads were jerked. Arms flung out. Here a hat
swooped in a semi-circle. Off drove the coach almost unnoticed. As it
turned the corner all the outside passengers craned their necks, and one
gentleman rose to his feet and shouted, “There! there! there!” before he
was bowled into eternity. It was an insect—a red-winged insect. Out the
people of Chepstow poured into the high road; down the hill they ran;
always the insect flew in front of them; at length by Chepstow Bridge a
young man, throwing his bandanna over the blade of an oar, captured it
alive and presented it to a highly respectable elderly gentleman who now
came puffing upon the scene—Samuel Budge, doctor, of Chepstow. By
Samuel Budge it was presented to Miss Ormerod; by her sent to a
professor at Oxford. And he, declaring it “a fine specimen of the rose
underwinged locust” added the gratifying information that it “was the
first of the kind to be captured so far west.”
And so, at the age of twenty-four Miss Eleanor Ormerod was thought the
proper person to receive the gift of a locust.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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