“Free America vur beeg contree,” said a returned soldier to one of his home folks who had never seen a hill higher than some of the great shell mounds on the eastern shore of the Matanzas River. “Mountains higher than clouds, lakes wide like sea. Minorcans vur small people. Room for ever’one here. Home best place after all.”
And so it is, even for the posterity of those so woefully misused by the British Trading Company’s George the Third methods, as to be miscalled five generations later by local detractors, “Turnbull’s slaves.”
Wm. Perry Brown.
The Mosquito.
There are more than three hundred and fifty tribes belonging to the mosquito race. These have been classified by the detectives of science into twenty-two families, and all placed in the same category with gnats, which are looked upon by most people as suspicious characters. These families are known by names of such “learned length and thundering sound” that it is thought safest to abstain from giving a list of them here; but like man, they may be known better by their color, habits and eccentricities than by name.
The mosquito is cosmopolitan, for he has explored and settled many parts of the arctic regions, including Alaska, Greenland and Iceland, and established his home on the continents of Europe, Asia and Africa, and in the remotest islands of the sea. He had very probably discovered America before Christopher Columbus set sail for the new world, and it is now pretty certain that he first colonized New Jersey.
He has figured extensively in the history of the world, yet he wears no laurel wreath of glory for valor in war. All martial victories and renown of his race belong to the gentler (?) sex of the family. She is a kind of Joan of Arc, of a fierce, restless and war-like spirit; but it is consoling to know that she is less savage in the temperate than in the torrid zone; for, we are informed by travelers that in the tropics she often leads her legions in a charge with fixed bayonets directly upon a sleeping man’s face, when they fall upon him in myriads, like pelting hailstones out of a storm-cloud.
There are instances of record in which her furious armies have filled the air for many miles, darkening the heavens like dense columns of flying cloud, and attacking man and beast like blood-thirsty demons. A Greek historian relates that such an army once swooped down upon ancient Greece and drove the inhabitants from their homes.
Besides being thus famous as a soldier, she enjoys the unique distinction of being a queen of song. Strange to say, in this gift she has a complete monopoly, while the male has been left to regret the sad fate of being forever songless and silent. However, he has been well compensated for this privation. Some tribes of his race have less musical talent than others; but those who have studied his anatomy, habits and genius declare that in tribes in which there are queens of song, he is, without doubt, the king of listeners, since nature has provided him with many hundreds of ears, no doubt to enhance his pleasure from vocal music. These curious ears are small hairs located on his antennæ, or feelers, which, like the strings of harp or violin under the touch of a virtuoso, tremble in unison with the harmony that flows from the living melodion of his queen, until his soul is on fire with melody. Not one of these delicately attuned ears ever seems to be shocked by a falsetto note from the vocal chords of his charmer. To him her song, like that of Wynomoinen, the magical singer, or the sirens of mythical story, is full of the power of enchantment; and the eavesdroppers of science who watch him and listen, tell us that he draws near her whenever she pours out her soul in song. The manner in which she produces her buzzing tones is very wonderful: The lower or contralto note is the result of the rapid vibration of her wings at the rate of three thousand per minute. It is not remarkable, then, that her flight is so swift from her enraged human pursuer. But when she trills and yodles and sings her high soprano, her fantastic music flows from stridulating organs which resemble tiny drums at the openings of minute air tubes. These higher runs thrill Monsignor Mosquito into ecstacies of pure delight. His ravished soul is borne out upon the silver sea of song as he sits on a honeysuckle sipping nectar, listening the while to the wooing voices of his divine inamoratas—the Pattis, Nilssons and Nordicas of his race. But not so with the human auditor of the mosquito prima donna who lies peacefully on his bed at night under the hypnotic spell of sweet sleep. Perchance it is midnight’s holy hour when he is suddenly awakened by a still small voice more pricking than the voice of conscience. He springs up and lights the gas or lamp and tries to draw nigh unto lady mosquito as did her enchanted knight with wings; he is thirsting for her life while she is thirsting for his blood.
But not only is our heroine celebrated in history as a warrior and a vocalist, but as a most dangerous enemy of mankind. Nature has seen fit to give her a long nose, or proboscis, which, according to the Darwinian theory, might prove her to be related to the elephant. She does not hesitate “to stick her nose into other people’s business,” and this is precisely the thing which, in the case of mosquitoes as of men, leads her into irreparable injury to humanity and very frequently to her own instant demise.