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=_211._= CONSEQUENCES OF EXPOSING AN OLD ERROR.
Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone
which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found it, with the
grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round it, close to its
edges,--and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told
you it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick, or your
foot, or your fingers, under its edge, and turned it over as a housewife
turns a cake, when she says to herself, "It's done brown enough by this
time?" What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant
surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not
suspected, until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members
produced by your turning the old stone over! Blades of grass flattened
down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and
ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or
horny-shelled,--turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them softer
but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches; (Nature
never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern
bedstead, but she always has one of her flat pattern live timekeepers
to slide into it;) black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments
sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless,
slug-like creatures, young larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy
stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity.
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