On her return home something scuttled across the hall floor in front of her.  She sprang back with a scream.  It was a gigantic cockroach.  The hall was full of them.  She summoned the servants, and they set to work to kill them.  But they might as well have tried to stop Niagara, for as fast as they squashed one battalion, another took its place.  They came out of cracks in the floor, from behind the wainscoting, from every conceivable place in the kitchens, and in a dense black ribbon some six inches broad, ascended the staircase.  Gladys tried to barricade her room against them, but it was of no avail.  They came from under the boards of the floor and poured down the chimney.  They swarmed over the furniture, in the cupboards, chest of drawers, the washstand (where they kept continually falling into the water), in her clothes (her dressing-gown was covered with them), over the bed, and the climax was reached when they approached the chair she stood on.  Too fascinated with horror to move, she watched them crawling up to her.  She was thus found by her father.  He had come to her assistance in the very nick of time, and after lifting her from the chair and taking her to a place, as yet safe from molestation, returned to her room, where, with savage blows, smashing, equally, beetles and furniture, he remained till daybreak.

With the first streak of dawn the beetles decamped, and the fray ended.  The work of devastation had been colossal.  Corpses were strewn everywhere—­and it took the combined household hours, before all evidences of the slaughter were obliterated.  As for Gladys, she had not slept all night and was a wreck.

“I can never go through another night of it,” she said to Miss Templeton.  “Do you think we shall ever get rid of the horrible things?”

“We can but try, dear!” Miss Templeton said consolingly, and she accompanied Gladys up to town, where they inquired of doctors, and chemists, and all sorts of possible and impossible people; and returned to Kew laden with chemicals, and patent beetle destroyers.  But though they tried remedies by the score, none were of use, and the beetles repeated their performance of the preceding night.

Gladys did not go to bed:  surrounded with lighted candles, she sat on the top of a wardrobe till daybreak.  The following morning the house was fumigated with sulphur; and people were told off to kill the cockroaches, as they made their escape out of doors.  By this means an enormous number were killed; but at night they were just as bad as before.

An engineer friend then suggested a freezing-machine.  The temperature of the house was reduced to ten degrees below zero; the pipes froze (and burst next day), the milk froze, the housemaid’s toes and the cook’s little finger of the left hand froze, everything froze; and presumably the beetles froze, for there was not one to be seen.

However, it was quite impossible to resort again to this extreme measure.  John Martin had the most agonizing attacks of lumbago.  Gladys had neuralgia, and Miss Templeton—­a slight touch of pleurisy.