that is, for those who have not eaten the Food—and it has two sharp jaws that meet in front of its head, tubular jaws with sharp points, through which its habit is to suck its victim's blood.
The first things to get at the drifting grains of the Food were the tadpoles and the water snails; the little wriggling tadpoles in particular, once they had the taste of it, took to it with zest. But scarcely did one of them begin to grow into a conspicuous position in that tadpole world and try a smaller brother or so as an aid to a vegetarian dietary, when nip! one of the Beetle larvæ had its curved blood-sucking prongs gripping into his heart, and with that red stream went Herakleophorbia IV., in a state of solution, into the being of a new client. The only thing that had a chance with these monsters to get any share of the Food were the rushes and slimy green scum in the water and the seedling weeds in the mud at the bottom. A clean-up of the study presently washed a fresh spate of the Food into the puddle, overflowed it, and carried all this sinister expansion of the struggle for life into the adjacent pool under the roots of the alder. . . .
The first person to discover what was going on was a Mr. Lukey Carrington, a special science teacher under the London Education Board, and, in his leisure, a specialist in fresh-water algæ, and he is certainly not to be envied his discovery. He had come down to Keston Common for the day to fill a number of specimen tubes for subsequent examination, and he came, with a dozen or so of corked tubes clanking faintly in his pocket, over the sandy crest
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