The Death-Watch

The small beetle called the death-watch, which lives in old wood and ticks like a watch, was long thought to foretell a death in the family. Hone quotes Wallis’s History of Northumberland on the insect, and Swift’s comic verses about chambermaids who christened the worm a death-watch, with a kettle of scalding water as the sure cure for the omen. Baxter wrote that discreet friends of his had been frightened by the noise, though he had found it was made by a little running creature behind paper pasted on a wall, and was heard mostly in the heat of summer.