The Autobiography of a Flea. Stanislas Rhodes de

       Chapter One

      Born I was – but how, when, or where I cannot say; so I must leave the reader to accept the assertion per se, and believe it if he will. One thing is equally certain, the fact of my birth is not one atom less veracious than the reality of these memoirs, and if the intelligent student of these pages wonders how it came to pass that one in my walk – or perhaps, I should have said jump – of life, became possessed of the learning, observation and power of committing to memory the whole of the wonderful facts and disclosures I am about to relate, I can only remind him that there are intelligences little suspected by the vulgar, and laws in Nature the very existence of which have not yet been detected by the advanced among the scientific world.

      I have heard it somewhere remarked that my province was to get my living by blood sucking. I am not the lowest by any means of that universal fraternity, and if I sustain a precarious existence upon the bodies of those with whom I come in contact, my own experience proves that I do so in a marked and peculiar manner, with a warning of my employment which is seldom given by those in other grades of my profession. But I submit that I have other and nobler aims than the mere sustaining of my being by the contributions of the unwary. I have been conscious of this original defect, and, with a soul far above the vulgar instincts of my race, I jumped by degrees to heights of mental perception and erudition which placed me for ever upon a pinnacle of insect grandeur.

      It is this attainment to learning which I shall evoke in describing the scenes of which I have been a witness – nay, even a partaker. I shall not stop to explain by what means I am possessed of human powers of thinking and observing, but, in my lucubrations, leave you simply to perceive that I possess them and wonder accordingly.

      You will thus perceive that I am not a common flea; indeed, when it is borne in mind the company in which I have been accustomed to mingle, the familiarity with which I have been suffered to treat persons the most exalted, and the opportunities I have possessed to make the most of my acquaintances, the reader will no doubt agree with me that I am in very truth a most wonderful and exalted insect.

      My earliest recollections lead me back to a period when I found myself within a church. There was a rolling of rich music and a slow monotonous chanting which then filled me with surprise and admiration, but I have long since learnt the true importance of such influences, and the attitudes of the worshippers are now taken by me for the outward semblance of inward emotions which are very generally non-existent. Be this as it may, I was engaged upon professional business connected with the plump white leg of a young lady of some sixteen years of age, the taste of whose delicious blood I well remember, and the flavour of whose –

      But I am digressing.

      Soon after I had commenced in a quiet and friendly way my little attentions, the young girl in common with the rest of the congregation rose to depart, and I, as a matter of course, determined to accompany her.

      I am very sharp of sight as well as of hearing, and that is how I saw a young gentleman slip a small folded piece of white paper into the young lady’s pretty gloved hand, as she passed through the crowded porch. I had noticed the name Bella neatly worked upon the soft silk stocking which had at first attracted me, and I now saw the same word appeared alone upon the outside of the billet-doux. She was with her aunt, a tall, stately dame, with whom I did not care to get upon terms of intimacy.

      Bella was a beauty – just sixteen – a perfect figure, and although so young, her soft bosom was already budding into those proportions which delight the other sex. Her face was charming in its frankness; her breath sweet as the perfumes of Arabia, and, as I always said, her skin as soft as velvet. Bella was evidently well aware of her