Dick Sands, the Boy Captain

heat or cold; he vegetated rather than lived, and might not inaptly be compared to a tree which, though healthy enough at its core, produces scant foliage and no fruit. His long arms and legs were in the way of himself and everybody else; yet no one could possibly treat him with unkindness. As M. Prudhomme would say, “if only he had been endowed with capability,” he would have rendered a service to anyone in the world; but helplessness was his dominant characteristic; helplessness was ingrained into his very nature; yet this very helplessness made him an object of kind consideration rather than of contempt, and Mrs. Weldon looked upon him as a kind of elder brother to her little Jack.

It must not be supposed, however, that Cousin Benedict was either idle or unoccupied. On the contrary, his whole time was devoted to one absorbing passion for natural history. Not that he had any large claim to be regarded properly as a natural historian; he had made no excursions over the whole four districts of zoology, botany, mineralogy, and geology, into which the realms of natural history are commonly divided; indeed, he had no pretensions at all to be either a botanist, a mineralogist, or a geologist; his studies only sufficed to make him a zoologist, and that in a very limited sense. No Cuvier was he; he did not aspire to decompose animal life by analysis, and to recompose it by synthesis; his enthusiasm had not made him at all deeply versed in Vertebrata, Mollusca, or Radiata; in fact, the Vertebrata⁠—animals, birds, reptiles, fishes⁠—had had no place in his researches; the Mollusca⁠—from the Cephalopoda to the Bryozoa⁠—had had no attractions for him; nor had he consumed the midnight oil in investigating the Radiata, the Echinodermata, Acalephae, Polypi, entozoa, or infusoria.

No; Cousin Benedict’s interest began and ended with the Articulata; and it must be owned at once that his studies were very far from embracing all the range of the six classes into which “Articulata” are subdivided; viz, the Insecta, the Myriapoda, the Arachnida, the Crustacea, the Cirrhopoda, and the Annelida; and he was utterly unable in scientific language to distinguish a worm from a leech, an earwig from a sea-acorn, a spider from a scorpion, a shrimp from a froghopper, or a galley-worm from a centipede.

To confess the plain truth, Cousin Benedict was an amateur entomologist, and nothing more.

Entomology, it may be asserted, is a wide science; it embraces the whole division of the Articulata; but our friend was an entomologist only in the limited sense of the popular acceptation of the word; that is to say, he was an observer and collector of insects, meaning by “insects” those Articulata which have bodies consisting of a number of concentric movable rings, forming three distinct segments, each with a pair of legs, and which are scientifically designated as hexapods.

To this extent was Cousin Benedict an entomologist; and when it is remembered that the class of Insecta of which he had grown up to be the enthusiastic student comprises no less than ten1 orders, and that of these ten the Coleoptera and Diptera alone include 30,000 and 60,000 species respectively, it must be confessed that he had an ample field for his most persevering exertions.

Every available hour did he spend in the pursuit of his favourite science: hexapods ruled his thoughts by day and his dreams by night. The number of pins that he carried thick on the collar and sleeves of his coat, down the front of his waistcoat, and on the crown of his hat, defied computation; they were kept in readiness for the capture of specimens that might come in his way, and on his return from a ramble in the country he might be seen literally encased with a covering of insects, transfixed adroitly by scientific rule.

This ruling passion of his had been the inducement that had urged him to accompany Mr. and Mrs. Weldon to New Zealand. It had appeared to him that it was likely to be a promising district, and now having been successful in adding some rare specimens to his collection, he was anxious to get back again to San Francisco, and to assign them their proper places in his extensive cabinet.

Besides, it never occurred to Mrs. Weldon to start without him. To leave him to shift for himself would be sheer cruelty. As a matter of course whenever Mrs. Weldon went on board the Pilgrim, Cousin Benedict would go too. Not that in any emergency assistance of any kind could be expected from him; on the contrary, in the case of difficulty he would be an additional burden; but there was every reason to expect a fair passage and no cause of misgiving of any kind, so the propriety of leaving the amiable entomologist behind was never suggested.

Anxious that she should be no impediment in the way of the due departure of the Pilgrim from Waitemata, Mrs. Weldon made her preparations with the utmost haste, discharged the servants which she had temporarily engaged at Auckland, and accompanied by little Jack and the old negress, and followed mechanically by Cousin Benedict, embarked on the 22nd of January on board the schooner.

The amateur, however, kept his eye very scrupulously upon his own special box. Amongst his collection of insects were some very remarkable examples of new staphylinids, a species of carnivorous Coleoptera with eyes placed above their head; it was a kind supposed to be peculiar to New Caledonia. Another rarity which had been brought under his notice was a venomous spider, known among the Maoris as a “katipo;” its bite was asserted to be very often fatal. As a spider, however, belongs to the order of the Arachnida, and is not properly an “insect,” Benedict declined to take any interest in it. Enough for him that he had secured a novelty in his own section of research; the “Staphylin Neo-Zelandus” was not only the gem of his collection, but