Chapter IV

--"Is there anything still living and lurking in old black drains of Thought,--any bigotry, any prejudice, anything in the moral world whereunto the centipede may be likened?"

--"Really, I do not know," replied the friend to whom I had put the question; "but you need only go as far as the vegetable world for a likeness. Did you ever see anything like this?" he added, opening a drawer and taking therefrom something revolting, which, as he pressed it in his hand, looked like a long thick bundle of dried centipedes.

--"Touch them," he said, holding out to me the mass of articulated flat bodies and bristling legs.

--"Not for anything!" I replied, in astonished disgust. He laughed, and opened his hand. As he did so, the mass expanded.

--"Now look," he exclaimed!

Then I saw that all the bodies were united at the tails--grew together upon one thick flat annulated stalk... a plant!--"But here is the fruit," he continued, taking from the same drawer a beautifully embossed ovoid nut, large as a duck's egg, ruddy-colored, and so exquisitely varnished by nature as to resemble a rosewood carving fresh from the hands of the cabinet-maker. In its proper place among the leaves and branches, it had the appearance of something delicious being devoured by a multitude of centipedes. Inside was a kernel, hard and heavy as iron-wood; but this in time, I was told, falls into dust: though the beautiful shell remains always perfect.

Negroes call it the _coco-macaque._

MA BONNE