brush them off. With delight he recognises in
them divers species of "ticks," but he must
detach each one quickly and carefully, and think
himself lucky to have espied them soon enough.
Moreover, he must discard from his chamber
every garment he wore in the woods, for only
the laundress can effectually rid him of the
foreign multitude which has established colonies
thereon.

That strange excrescence growing out of one
shoulder, and another in his side, a third on his
ribs, and more elsewhere, puzzle him for a
minute. He must go close to the candle, and
will find these to be halves of ticks of a larger
kind—half only of each, the rest of the specimen
being buried deeply, head-foremost, in his
own flesh. Our friend will be very careful how
he pulls them out, for these shining, tough little
suctoria may be cut in two sometimes, before
one can dislodge them. The entomologist will
probably find himself made the habitat of three
varieties of these small crab-like ticks. What
with ticks proper, and those locally called
red bugs, answering to our English harvest
bugs, but which, in the South, arrive with the
fruits and flowers of May, jiggers, chiggers, or
chegoes and chinches; piques, nigua or tingua;
punez, bêtes-rouges, cirons des paupières,
brulots, and all other biting, stinging, and
penetrating creatures, one gets such a mottled result,
that it is impossible to decide which is the
identical red bump or tumour that each insect has
produced.

One other description of a minute tormentor
can no more be evaded here than we can evade
the ever-present specimen itself in that prolific
sunny South. It is certainly not one of the
acari, " whose motions are rather slow," or the
"ricini, that live exclusively on the class aves,"
though it might even be the terrible sarcopta,
that " were carried away to the sea in basketsfull.
"Its local name is chicken-mite, but
whether it has eight legs, or whether it leaps or
flies, I cannot declare. There is no escaping
him. Like the chegoe, he attacks the
freshly-landed European, which proves—as the
illustrious Humboldt declared—that these little
horrors " can distinguish what the most delicate
chemical analysis has hitherto failed to do,"
namely, that " difference of blood, which forms
so"—more than ever—" interesting a question"
at the present day.

You are quietly seated within the house,
reading, perhaps. Suddenly a sensation, as of a
single hair drawn over your hand, causes you to
look down. At first you see nothing; yet there
is certainly something moving quickly towards
your wrist or your knuckles, and, upon looking
intently, you discover a tiny globule sliding or
rolling along with amazing rapidity. It is so
minute, that a touch will effectually check its
career; but, if you are expert enough to catch
it under your lens, you will see a creature so
delicately formed and gracefully agile that you
will recal its aspect with less unkindly feelings,
though, withal, it is a very noxious insect, and
you dare not spare its life. Its bite causes a
very painful tumour, of which the poison may
not be absorbed for many days. The effect is
much the same as that produced by the almost
invisible speck of life called red bug. Take care
how you lean against the piazza upon which the
pigeons are fond of alighting; be cautious how
you handle even your pet birdlings; and avoid
the hencoop at all hazards. Unless the poultry-yard
is very carefully tended, the young chickens
are destroyed by these acari. On a plantation near
the Gulf of Mexico, where neglect had resulted
in a terrible accumulation of chicken-mites, not
a chicken, a young turkey, or a guinea-fowl
could be reared during one entire season. The
poor hens grew thin and sickly on their nests,
and looked as if every drop of blood was drained
from them; their combs and gills lost every
vestige of colour; and, as soon as the little
chickens were hatched, they were smothered
with the mites, which were literally heaped up
in the nests. These mites are not confined
to poultry. Birds in cages, and the nests
of wild birds, are alike infested, though the
instinct of the latter is a match for them.
The neglected domestic fowl is the greatest
sufferer.

It is absolutely impossible to keep clear of
these wonderfully active little creatures, which
seem to fall from the air, or to convey
themselves in some mysterious manner, suddenly
alighting upon you, and causing a faint titillation
by their rapid motion, which immediately
betrays their presence.

The only way to cleanse the places which they
infest, is to pour pailfuls of boiling water over
the floor or ground. The negroes do not seem
to be molested by them as the stranger is
sure to be; and they do not " establish
themselves under the cuticle " as the " chigger"
does. It is from these latter parasites that
the poor slaves with their bare feet often
suffer to an extent which causes them the
loss of their toes, owing to their neglect to
extract the insect before depositing its eggs in
the flesh.

Here surely are opportunities enough to
satisfy the most inveterate of entomologists;
but they are by no means all. Patience,
however, shall not be exhausted by description of
the prodigious spiders, of the venturesome
earwigs, the terrible centipedes several inches long
—all more or less venomous—and, worse than
any, the scorpion. As to ants, a whole chapter
might be devoted to them; but, for fear of
discouragement to entomologists who have a
thought of going South, I will not enlarge
upon the difficulty of preserving specimens
when they have been obtained; but just
venture to hint that nothing short of air-tight
mineral cases can be proof against the
persevering mandibles and consuming ravages of
the numerous tribes of ants, which seem to
abound equally within and without the Southern
mansion.

A distinguished naturalist has declared that
it is " less terrible for the forest to resound with
the roar of the lion than with the hum of the