As I lay listening, and recognising the sport in which they were engaged, I could not help wishing that I was a child, and not mixed up with all these terrors just as if I were a man.
“If we could only be at peace again!” I thought; and I lay wakeful, still thinking of the garden, the growing fruit, the humming-birds that whirred about like great insects among the flowers, and emitted a bright flash every now and then as the sun glanced from their scale-like feathers.
Then I pictured the orioles too, that pale yellow one with the black back and wings, and the gay orange and black fellow I so often saw among the trees. “How beautiful it all used to be!” I sighed. “Why can’t the Indians leave us alone?”
At last I grew drowsy, and lay dreamily fancying it was a hot, still night at home with the window open, and the cry of the whip-poor-will—that curious night-jar—coming from out of the trees of the swamp far beyond the stream where the alligators bellowed and the frogs kept up their monotonous, croaking roar.
Buzz—oooz—oooz!
“Bother the flies!”
I was wide-awake with the sun glaring on the canvas, and a great fly banging against it, knocking and butting its head and wings, when all the time there was the wide opening through which it had come ready for it to fly out.
“Ugh! You stupid thing,” I muttered, pettishly, as I lay watching it hardly awake, thinking I would get up and catch it, or try to drive it out; but feeling that if I did I should only kill it or damage it so that its life would be a misery to it, make myself hotter than I was, and perhaps not get rid of the fly after all.
“Well,” I cried, pettishly, “that’s too bad!”
For there was a fresh buzzing. Another fly had dashed in, and the two were playing a duet that was maddening to my overwrought senses.