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After that, curiously enough, there is no record of any big wasps being
seen for three days. I find on consulting the meteorological record of
those days that they were overcast and chilly with local showers, which
may perhaps account for this intermission. Then on the fourth day came
blue sky and brilliant sunshine and such an outburst of wasps as the
world had surely never seen before.
How many big wasps came out that day it is impossible to guess. There
are at least fifty accounts of their apparition. There was one victim, a
grocer, who discovered one of these monsters in a sugar-cask and very
rashly attacked it with a spade as it rose. He struck it to the ground
for a moment, and it stung him through the boot as he struck at it
again and cut its body in half. He was first dead of the two....
The most dramatic of the fifty appearances was certainly that of the
wasp that visited the British Museum about midday, dropping out of the
blue serene upon one of the innumerable pigeons that feed in the
courtyard of that building, and flying up to the cornice to devour its
victim at leisure. After that it crawled for a time over the museum
roof, entered the dome of the reading-room by a skylight, buzzed about
inside it for some little time--there was a stampede among the
readers--and at last found another window and vanished again with a
sudden silence from human observation.
Most of the other reports were of mere passings or descents. A picnic
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