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II.
Such were the circumstances by which the world had its first
notification that the Food was loose again. In another week Keston
Common was in full operation as what naturalists call a centre of
distribution. This time there were no wasps or rats, no earwigs and no
nettles, but there were at least three water-spiders, several dragon-fly
larvae which presently became dragon-flies, dazzling all Kent with their
hovering sapphire bodies, and a nasty gelatinous, scummy growth that
swelled over the pond margin, and sent its slimy green masses surging
halfway up the garden path to Doctor Winkles's house. And there began a
growth of rushes and equisetum and potamogeton that ended only with the
drying of the pond.
It speedily became evident to the public mind that this time there was
not simply one centre of distribution, but quite a number of centres.
There was one at Ealing--there can be no doubt now--and from that came
the plague of flies and red spider; there was one at Sunbury, productive
of ferocious great eels, that could come ashore and kill sheep; and
there was one in Bloomsbury that gave the world a new strain of
cockroaches of a quite terrible sort--an old house it was in Bloomsbury,
and much inhabited by undesirable things. Abruptly the world found
itself confronted with the Hickleybrow experiences all over again, with
all sorts of queer exaggerations of familiar monsters in the place of
the giant hens and rats and wasps. Each centre burst out with its own
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