r poison disfigured, to but small
purpose, every room; and at evening, by candlelight, while one was
reading or writing, the universal hum and buzz was amazing, and put
one in mind of the--

"Hushed by buzzing night-flies to thy slumber"

of poor King Henry. The walls and ceiling of the servants' offices
and kitchen, which at the beginning of the spring had been painted
white, and were immaculate in their purity, became literally a
yellow-brown coffee color, darkened all over with spots as black as
soot, with the defilement of these torments, of which three and four
dustpanfuls a day would be swept away dead without appreciably
diminishing their number.

These flies accompanied our whole summer, from June till the end of
October. Before, however, the beginning of the latter month, the
mosquitoes made their appearance; and though, owing to the peculiar
dryness of the summer of 1874, they were much less numerous than
usual, there came enough of them to make our days miserable and our
nights sleepless.

These are the common indoor insects of a common summer in this part
of Pennsylvania, to which should be added the occasional visits of
spiders of such dimensions as to fill me with absolute terror; I
have, unfortunately, a positive physical antipathy to these
strangely-mannered animals (the only resemblance, I fear, between
myself and Charles Kingsley), some of whose peculiarities, besides
their infinitely dexterous and deliberate processes for ensnaring
their prey, make them unspeakably repulsive to me,--indeed, to a
degree that persuades me that, at some former period of my
existence, "which, indeed, I can scarcely remember," as Rosalind
says, I must have been a fly who perished by spider-craft.

It is not, however, only in these midland and comparatively warmer
states of North America that this profusion of insect life is found;
the heat of the summer, even in Massachusetts, is more than a match
in its life-engendering force, for the destructive agency of the
winter's cold; and in the woods, on the high hill-tops of Berkshire,
spiders of the most enormous size abound. I found two on my own
place, the extremities of whose legs could not be covered by a large
inverted tumbler; one of these perfectly swarmed with parasitical
small spiders, a most hideous object! and one