"'They'll eat us up with their doggoned terbaccy-spittin' mouths; thet's how. And they'll eat you up by eatin' everything you want to eat; thet's how, too. Havin' nothin' to eat is jest about the same as bein' et, accordin' to the way I looks at things.'
"It is evident that Mr. Beasley was a philosopher and a pessimist; that is, a man who sees the disagreeable sides of things, who doesn't see the silvery lining to the dark clouds. In fact, in this particular case Mr. Beasley was seeing a very dark lining to that silvery cloud 'jest off the edge o' the sun.'
"I stared at the thin shining cloud for a long time, wondering if it were really true that it was grasshoppers. People said the silvery shimmer was made by the reflection of the sunlight from the gauzy wings of the hosts of flying insects. It occurred to me that if the hoppers were just off the edge of the sun, they would all be burned up, or at least have their wings so scorched that they would fall to the ground. However, as the sun is 90,000,000 miles away from the earth, it would take a very long time for the scorched grasshoppers to fall all the way. I guessed that we might have a rain of dead and crippled hoppers about Christmas-time. Anyway there were no grasshoppers now, dead or alive, in the street. And I decided, rather disappointedly, that we probably shouldn't get to see any of the live hoppers at all. Then I asked Mr. Beasley where they came from.
"'Rocky Mountains,' he answered, shortly.
"This seemed a bit steep, for the nearest of the Rocky Mountains are nearly a thousand miles west of Kansas. And to think of grasshoppers flying a thousand miles! A bit too much, that was. Still I thought I ought to go home and tell the folks. But mother interrupted me in my picturesque tale with a dry request for the meat. Oh, yes. Oh—well, I had forgotten. So the first disagreeable result for me from the grasshopper invasion of Kansas in the summer of 1876 was a painful domestic incident.
"But Mr. Beasley was right. The grasshoppers had come. Next morning all the boys were out, each with a folded newspaper for flapper and a cigar-box with lid tacked on and a small hole just large enough to push a hopper through cut in one end. The rumor was we were to be paid five cents for every hundred hoppers, dead or alive, that we brought in. As a matter of fact nobody paid us, but we worked hard for nearly half a day; that is as long as it was fun and novelty. By noon the grasshoppers were an old story to us. And besides there were too many of them. Hundreds, thousands, millions,—oh, billions and trillions I suppose. And all eating, eating, eating!
"First all the softer fresher green things. The vegetables in the little backyard gardens; the sweet corn and green peas and tomato-and potato-vines. Then the flowers and the grasses of the front yards. Then the leaves of the dooryard trees. Then the fresh green twigs of the trees! Then the bark on the younger branches!!
"And you could hear them eat! Nipping and crunching, tearing and chewing. It got to be terrible, and everybody so downcast and gloomy. And the most awful stories of what was going on out in the great corn-fields and meadows and pastures. Ruin, ruin, ruin was what the hoppers were mumbling as they chewed.
"And then the reports from the other states in the great Mississippi Valley corn-belt came in by telegraph and letter. Over thousands and thousands of square miles of the great granary of the land were spread the hordes of hoppers. Farmers and stockmen were being ruined. Then the storekeepers and bankers that sell things and lend money to the farmers. Then the lawyers and doctors that depend on the farmers' troubles to earn a living. Then the millers and stock-brokers and capitalists of the great cities that make their fortunes out of handling and buying and selling the grain the farmers send in long trains to the centers of population. Everybody, the whole country, was aghast and appalled at the havoc of the hopper.
"What to do? How long will they keep up this devastation? Have they come to settle and stay in Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa? What will the country do in the future for corn and wheat and pigs and fat cattle?