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Mr. Bensington's hens. It is in the nature of the wasp to attain to
effective maturity before the domestic fowl--and in fact of all the
creatures that were--through the generous carelessness of the
Skinners--partaking of the benefits Mr. Bensington heaped upon his hens,
the wasps were the first to make any sort of figure in the world.
It was a keeper named Godfrey, on the estate of Lieutenant-Colonel
Rupert Hick, near Maidstone, who encountered and had the luck
to kill the first of these monsters of whom history has any
record. He was walking knee high in bracken across an open space in the
beechwoods that diversify Lieutenant-Colonel Hick's park, and he was
carrying his gun--very fortunately for him a double-barrelled gun--over
his shoulder, when he first caught sight of the thing. It was, he says,
coming down against the light, so that he could not see it very
distinctly, and as it came it made a drone "like a motor car." He admits
he was frightened. It was evidently as big or bigger than a barn owl,
and, to his practised eye, its flight and particularly the misty whirl
of its wings must have seemed weirdly unbirdlike. The instinct of
self-defence, I fancy, mingled with long habit, when, as he says, he
"
let fly, right away."
The queerness of the experience probably affected his aim; at any rate
most of his shot missed, and the thing merely dropped for a moment with
an angry "Wuzzzz" that revealed the wasp at once, and then rose again,
with all its stripes shining against the light. He says it turned on
him. At any rate, he fired his second barrel at less than twenty yards
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