It looks exactly like a small flea, and a stranger would take it for one. However, in about four and twenty hours he would have several broad hints that he had made a mistake in his ideas of the animal. Without any respect for colour, it attacks different parts of the body, but chiefly the feet, betwixt the toe-nails and the flesh. There it buries itself and causes an itching, which at first is not unpleasant, but after a few days gradually increases to a violent pain. At the same time a small white tumour, about the size of a pea, and with a dark spot in the centre, rises under the skin. The tumour is the rapidly growing nest of the chegoe, the spot the little plague itself. And now it is high time to think of its extirpation, an operation in which the negro women are very expert. Gently removing with a pin the skin from the little round white ball or nest, precisely as we should peel an orange, and pressing the flesh all round, they generally succeed in squeezing it out without breaking, and then fill the cavity with snuff or tobacco, to guard against the possibility of a fresh colony being formed by some of the eggs remaining in the wound. New comers are particularly subject to these creatures. Waterton, who by practice appears to have become very expert in eradicating chegoes’ nests, once took four out of his feet in the course of the day, and a negress extracted no less than eighty-three out of Richard Schomburgk’s toes in one sitting. ‘Every evening,’ says the venerable naturalist of Walton Hall, ‘before sundown, it was part of my toilet to examine my feet and see that they were clear of chegoes. Now and then a nest would escape the scrutiny, and then I had to smart for it a day or two after. A chegoe once lit upon the back of my hand: wishful to see how he worked, I allowed him to take possession. He immediately set to work head foremost, and in about half an hour he had completely buried himself in the skin. I then let him feel the point of my knife, and exterminated him.’ If the prompt extraction of the chegoes’ nests is neglected, the worm-like larvæ creep out, continue the mining operations of their parent, and produce a violent inflammation, which may end in the mortification of a limb. It not unfrequently happens that negroes from sheer idleness or negligence in the first instance have been lamed for life and become loathsome to the sight. In such a state, these miserable objects are incurable, and death only puts an end to their sufferings.