en and strident
voices. By night there were small vicious mosquitoes, in colour an
appropriate black and in habit more bloodthirsty than Uhlans. After dark
the flame of his kerosene lamp was to them as the traditional light in
the traditional casement is to returning wanderers. It brought them in
millions, and with them tiny persistent gnats and many small
coffin-shaped beetles and hosts of pulpy, unwholesome-looking moths of
many sizes and as many colours. Screens and double screens at the window
openings did not avail to keep these visitors out. Somehow they found a
way in. The mosquitoes and the gnats preyed upon him; the beetles and
the moths were lured by the flame to a violent end. To save the wick
from being clogged by their burnt bodies he hooded the top of the lamp
with netting. This caused the lamp chimney to smoke and foul itself with
soot. To save his shins from attack he wrapped his legs in newspaper
buskins. For his hands and his face and his neck and his ears he could
devise no protection.

To be encountered just outside the door were huge flying cockroaches
that clung in his hair or buffeted him in the face as they blundered
along on purposeless flights. Still other insects, unseen but none the
less busy, added to the burden of his jeremiad. Borers riddled the pages
of his books; and the white ant, as greedy for wood pulp as a paper
baron, was constantly sapping and mining the underpinnings of his house.

Touching on the climate his tone was most rebellious. By all accounts
the weather was rarely what one born in Vermont would regard as
seasonable weather. According to him its outstanding characteristics
were heat, moistness and stickiness. If he took a nap in the afternoon
he rose from it as from a Turkish bath. His hair was plastered to his
head all day with dampness; his forehead and his face ran sweat; his
wrists were as though they had been parboiled and freshly withdrawn from
the water. Perspiration glued his garments to his frame. His shoes
behind the door turned a leprous white from mildew and rotted to pieces
while yet they were new.

The forest, into which he sometimes ventured, was a place of dampness,
deepness and smells; a place of great trees, fat fungoids, sprawling
creepers, preposterous looking parasites, orchids, lianas; a place of
things that crawled and climbed and twined and clung. It was filled
with weird sounds--the booming of wild pigeons; a nagging, tapping sound
as though woo