AN INVADER.—THE HARICOT-WEEVIL

Social Life in the Insect World by Jean-Henri Fabre, is part of the HackerNoon Books Series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. AN INVADER.—THE HARICOT-WEEVIL

CHAPTER XIX. AN INVADER.—THE HARICOT-WEEVIL

If there is one vegetable on earth that more than any other is a gift of the gods, it is the haricot bean. It has all the virtues: it forms a soft paste upon the tongue; it is extremely palatable, abundant, inexpensive, and highly nutritious. It is a vegetable meat which, without being bloody and repulsive, is the equivalent of the horrors outspread upon the butcher's slab. To recall its services the more emphatically, the Provençal idiom calls it the gounflo-gus—the filler of the poor.

Blessed Bean, consoler of the wretched, right well indeed do you fill the labourer, the honest, skilful worker who has drawn a low number in the crazy lottery of life. Kindly Haricot, with thr in which I read the following conversation between the master-sonneteer and a lady journalist, who was anxious to know which of his own works he preferred.

"What would you have me say?" said the poet.

"I do not know what to say, I do not know which sonnet I prefer; I have taken horrible pains with all of them.... But you, which do you prefer?"

"My dear master, how can I choose out of so many jewels, when each one is perfect in its beauty? You flash pearls, emeralds, and rubies before my astonished eyes: how should I decide to prefer the emerald to the pearl? I am transported by admiration of the whole necklace."

"Well, as for me, there is something I am more proud of than of all my sonnets, and which has done much more for my reputation tha

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