Bête-ni-Pié.
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ticle indispensable in the tropics; and you had better never open it carelessly. H e may even take a notion to curl himself up in your hat, suspended on the wall—(I have known a trigonocephalus to do the same thing in a country-house). H e has also a singular custom of mounting upon the long trailing dresses (douillettes) worn by Martinique women,—and climbing up very swiftly and lightly to the wearer's neck, where the prickling of his feet first betrays his presence. Sometimes he will get into bed with you and bite you, because you have not resolution enough to lie perfectly still w h i l e he is tickling you. . . . It is well to remember before dressing that merely shaking a garment may not dislodge him ;—you must examine every part very patiently,—particularly the sleeves of a coat and the legs of pantaloons. The vitality of the creature is amazing. I kept one in a bottle without food or water for thirteen weeks, at the end of which time it remained active and dangerous as ever. Then I fed it with living insects, which it devoured ravenously ; — beetles, roaches, earthworms, several lepistnce, even one of the dangerous - looking millepedes, which have a great resemblance in outward structure to the centipede, but a thinner body, and more numerous limbs,—all seemed equally palatable to the prisoner. . . . I knew an instance of one, nearly a foot long, remaining in a silk parasol for more than four months, and emerging unexpectedly one day, with aggressiveness undiminished, to bite the hand that had involuntarily given it deliverance. In the city the centipede has but one natural enemy able to cope with him,—the hen ! The hen attacks him with delight, and often swallows him, head first, without taking the trouble to kill him. The cat hunts him, but she is careful never to put her head near him ;—she has a trick of whirling him round and round upon the floor so quickly as to stupefy him : then, when she sees a