We had just finished lunch by the lake-side at Bala, my friend Ben Roberts and I, and were thinking of trying the fishing once more, for the clouds had banked up from the west and obscured the sun’s glare, a little breeze had rippled the water, and everything looked promising, when the Captain burst out laughing.
“Shiver my timbers! as sailors say on the stage, Nie,” cried he, “if there isn’t that same old stag-beetle making his way up your jacket again, intent on revenge.”
“Plague take it!” I exclaimed, shaking the brute off again; “I have flicked him away once; I shall have to kill him now.”
“No you won’t,” said Ben Roberts; “the world happens to be wide enough for the lot of us. Let him live. I’m a kind of Brahmin, Nie; I never take life unless there is dire necessity.
“We in England,” continued Captain Roberts, “have little to complain about in the matter of insects; our summer flies annoy us a little, the mountain midges tickle, and the gnats bite, and hornets sting. But think of what some of the natives of other countries suffer. I remember as if it were this moment a plague of locusts that fell upon a beautiful and fertile patch of country on the seaboard of South Africa. It extended only for some two hundred miles, but the destruction was complete.
“The scenes of grief and misery I witnessed in some of the villages I rode through, I shall remember till my dying day.
“‘All, all gone!’ cried one poor Caffre woman who could talk English, ‘no food for husband, self, or children, and we can’t eat the stones.’
“These poor wretches were positively reduced to eating the locusts themselves.”