The
Colour Of This Strange And Unwelcome Visitor Was A Pale Greenish Grey,
With Numerous Dull Black Mottlings And Small Spots.
The story of its
appearance is perhaps worth giving.
It happened that I had a baby sister who could just toddle about on
two legs, having previously gone on all-fours. One midsummer day she
was taken up and put on a rug in the shade of a tree, twenty-five
yards from the sitting-room door, and left alone there to amuse
herself with her dolls and toys. After half an hour or so she appeared
at the door of the sitting-room where her mother was at work, and
standing there with wide-open astonished eyes and moving her hand and
arm as if to point to the place she came from, she uttered the
mysterious word _ku-ku_. It is a wonderful word which the southern
South American mother teaches her child from the moment it begins to
toddle, and is useful in a desert and sparsely inhabited country where
biting, stinging, and other injurious creatures are common. For babies
when they learn to crawl and to walk are eager to investigate and have
no natural sense of danger. Take as an illustration the case of the
gigantic hairy brown spider, which is excessively abundant in summer
and has the habit of wandering about as if always seeking something -
"something it cannot find, it knows not what"; and in these wanderings
it comes in at the open door and rambles about the room.
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