The solemn Death-watch clicks the hour of death.
The witty Dean of St. Patrick endeavored to perform this useful task by means of ridicule. And his description, suggested, it would appear, by the old song of "A cobbler there was, and he lived in a stall," runs thus:
----A wood worm That lies in old wood, like a hare in her form, With teeth or with claws, it will bite, it will scratch; And chambermaids christen this worm a Death-watch; Because, like a watch, it always cries click. Then woe be to those in the house that are sick! For, sure as a gun, they will give up the ghost, If the maggot cries click when it scratches the post. But a kettle of scalding hot water injected, Infallibly cures the timber affected: The omen is broken, the danger is over, The maggot will die, and the sick will recover.
Grose, in his Antiquities, thus expresses this superstition: "The clicking of a Death-watch is an omen of the death of some one in the house wherein it is heard." Watts says: "We learn to presage approaching death in a family by ravens and little worms, which we therefore call a Death-watch."[184] Gay, in one of his Pastorals, thus alludes to it:
When Blonzelind expired,.... The solemn Death-watch click'd the hour she died.[185]
An' when she heard the Dead-watch tick, She raving wild did say, "I am thy murderer, my child; I see thee, come away."
Misers are muck-worms, silkworms beaux, And Death watches physicians.[186]
"It will take," says Mrs. Taylor, a writer in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, "a force unknown at the present time to physiological science to eradicate the feeling of terror and apprehension felt by almost every one on hearing this small insect." She herself, an entomologist, confesses to have been very much annoyed at times by coming in contact with this "strange nuisance;" but she was cured by an overapplication. "I went to pay a visit," says she, "to a friend in the country. The first night I fancied I should have gone mad before morning. The walls of the bed-room were papered, and from them beat, as it were, a thousand watches--tick, tick, tick! Turn which way I would, cover my head under the bedclothes to suffocation, every pulse in my body had an answering tick, tick, tick! But at last the welcome morning dawned, and early I was down in the library; even here every book, on shelf above shelf, was riotous with tick, tick, tick! At the breakfast table, beneath the plates, cups, and dishes, beat the hateful sound. In the parlor, the withdrawing-room, the kitchen, nothing but tick, tick! The house was a huge clock, with thousands of pendulums ticking from morning till night. I was careful not to allow my great discomfort to annoy others. I argued what they could tolerate, surely I could; and in a few days habit had rendered the fearful, dreaded ticking a positive necessity."[187]