vish of their lives; they choked the flame and the water, which
destroyed them the while, and the vast living hostile armament still
moved on.

They moved right on like soldiers in their ranks, stopping at nothing,
and straggling for nothing; they carried a broad furrow or wheal all
across the country, black and loathsome, while it was as green and
smiling on each side of them and in front, as it had been before they
came. Before them, in the language of prophets, was a paradise, and
behind them a desert. They are daunted by nothing they surmount walls
and hedges, and enter enclosed gardens or inhabited houses. A rare and
experimental vineyard has been planted in a sheltered grove. The high
winds of Africa will not commonly allow the light trellice or the slim
pole; but here the lofty poplar of Campania has been possible, on which
the vine plant mounts so many yards into the air, that the poor
grape-gatherers bargain for a funeral pile and a tomb as one of the
conditions of their engagement. The locusts have done what the winds and
lightning could not do, and the whole promise of the vintage, leaves and
all, is gone, and the slender stems are left bare. There is another
yard, less uncommon, but still tended with more than common care; each
plant is kept within due bounds by a circular trench round it, and by
upright canes on which it is to trail; in an hour the solicitude and
long toil of the vine-dresser are lost, and his pride humbled. There is
a smiling farm; another sort of vine, of remarkable character, is found
against the farmhouse. This vine springs from one root, and has clothed
and matted with its many branches the four walls. The whole of it is
covered thick with long clusters, which another month will ripen. On
every grape and leaf there is a locust. Into the dry caves and pits,
carefully strewed with straw, the harvest-men have (safely, as they
thought just now) been lodging the far-famed African wheat. One grain or
root shoots up into ten, twenty, fifty, eighty, nay, three or four
hundred stalks: sometimes the stalks have two ears apiece, and these
shoot into a number of lesser ones. These stores are intended for the
Roman populace, but the locusts have been beforehand with them. The
small patches of ground belonging to the poor peasants up and down the
country, for raising the turnips, garlic, barley, water-melons, on which
they live, are the prey of these glutton invaders as much as the
choicest vines an