[THE COMBAT.
THE TROPICAL REGIONS. ]
A lady of our family, who resided in Louisiana, was nursing her young child. Every night her sleep was troubled by the strange sensation of a cold gliding object which sought to draw the milk from her breast. On one occasion she felt the same impression, and it aroused her. She sprang up, summoned her attendants; a light was brought; they search every corner, turn over the bed, and at last discover the frightful nursling—a serpent of great size and of a dangerous species. The horror which she felt instantly dried up her milk.
Levaillant relates that at the Cape of Good Hope, in a circle of friends, and during a quiet conversation, the lady of the house turned pale, and uttered a terrible cry. A serpent had crept up her legs, one of those whose sting is death in a couple of minutes. With great difficulty it was killed.
In India, a French soldier, resuming his knapsack which he had placed on the ground, discovered behind it the dangerous black serpent, the most venomous of his tribe. He was about to cut it in two when a merciful Hindu interposed, obtained its pardon, and took up the serpent. Stung by it, he died immediately.
Such are the terrors of nature in those formidable climates. But reptiles, now-a-days rare, are not the greatest curse. In all places and at all times it is now the insect. Insects everywhere, and in everything; they possess an infinity of means for attacking you; they walk, swim, glide, fly; they are in the air, and you breathe them. Invisible, they make known their presence by the most painful wounds. Recently, in one of our sea-ports, an official of the customs opened a parcel of papers brought from the colonies a long time previously. A fly furiously darted out of it; it pursued, it stung him; two days afterwards he was a corpse.
The hardiest of men, the buccaneers and filibusters, declared that of all dangers and of all pains they dreaded most the wounds of insects.
Frequently intangible, invisible, irresistible, they are destruction itself under an unavoidable form. How shall you oppose them when they make war upon you in legions? Once, at Barbadoes, the inhabitants observed an immense army of great ants, which, impelled by unknown causes, advanced in a serried column and in the same direction against the houses. To kill them was only trouble lost. There were no means of arresting their progress. At last an ingenious mind fortunately suggested that trains of gunpowder should be laid across their route, and set on fire. These volcanoes terrified them, and the torrent of invasion gradually turned aside.
No mediæval armoury, with all the strange weapons then made use of; no chirurgical implement factory, with the thousands of dreadful instruments invented by modern art, can be compared with the monstrous armour of Tropical insects—their pincers, their nippers, their teeth, their saws, their horns, their augers, all their tools of combat, of death, and of dissection, with which they come armed to the battle, with which they labour, pierce, cut, rend, and finely partition, with skill and dexterity equal to their furious blood-thirstiness.
Our grandest works may not defy the energetic force of these terrible legions. Give them a ship of the line—what do I say? a town—to devour, and they charge at it with eager joy. In course of time they have excavated under Valentia, near Caraccas, vast abysses and catacombs; the city is now literally suspended. A few individuals of this voracious tribe, unfortunately transported to Rochelle, have set to work to eat up the place, and already more than one edifice trembles upon timbers which are only externally sound, and at the core are rotten.