I contracted a special prejudice against them when they came out of the floor into my barrel of sermons—and I remembered the particular quality of food they are supposed to relish. I was not using those sermons in Africa and it is not likely I should ever have used them again anywhere; neither am I the victim of any delusion in regard to the loss that the world sustained in their destruction. The loss was mine alone, and was chiefly sentimental. But a minister usually has a unique regard for his sermons, a regard proportioned to the extent that they represent the sweat of the brain and the heart. In this instance the destruction was only partial; for by a mere accident I discovered them before they had entirely chewed and digested all my sermons. These are a few of the most troublesome insect pests, and there are others. There is the big flying beetle, purblind and stupid, that comes in the evening and looks the size of a bat; that circles around the table several times, with a noisy boom, tumbles at length into the gravy and then flops into your face. There is the hippo fly, like an enormous horsefly, that thrusts a stiletto into one through his clothing. In the upper part of the Gaboon River, where navigation with a launch was dangerous and I stood constantly by the engine, I had a boy, sometimes two boys, standing beside me with fly-brushes to keep them off. There are caterpillars the very touch of whose hair is poisonous and produces an irritation of the skin. There are wasps that daub nests of mud on frames and furniture and even on clothing if it is left hanging for a while without being disturbed. In many parts there are myriads of may-flies that swarm about sunset, that is, about dinnertime. Sir Harry Johnston complains that these may-flies give soup an aromatic flavour. There is the boring beetle that burrows into the rafters, reducing them to dust. There is the _walking-stick_, a slender dead twig, six or eight inches long, with lateral stems, which you sometimes find hanging to your curtains or mosquito-net, and which, when you take it in your fingers to throw it out, suddenly spreads aborted wings, nearly transparent and of purple hue, and flies around you, a creature of only one magnitude—length without breadth; a conglomeration of dark lines plunging through the air. Then, startled out of your wits, you think you have seen the devil for sure.