The waves _chug-chug-chugged_ sullenly against
them, and the fringe of a dark pine forest, drawn back from a breadth
of natural grass, lowered across the horizon like a thunder-cloud.
Deuce and I made camp with the uneasy feeling of being under inimical
inspection. A cold wind ruffled lead-like waters. No comfort was in the
prospect, so we retired early. Then it appeared that the coarse grass
of the park had bred innumerable black flies, and that we had our work
cut out for us.
The question of flies--using that, to a woodsman, eminently connotive
word in its wide embracement of mosquitoes, sandflies, deer-flies,
black flies, and midges--is one much mooted in the craft. On no
subject are more widely divergent ideas expressed. One writer claims
that black flies' bites are but the temporary inconvenience of a
pin-prick; another tells of boils lasting a week as the invariable
result of their attentions; a third sweeps aside the whole question as
unimportant to concentrate his anathemas on the musical mosquito; still
a fourth descants on the maddening midge, and is prepared to defend his
claims against the world. A like dogmatic partisanship obtains in the
question of defences. Each and every man possessed of a tongue
wherewith to speak or a pen wherewith to write, heralds the particular
merits of his own fly-dope, head-net, or mosquito-proof tent-lining.
Eager advocates of the advantages of pork fat, kerosene, pine tar,
pennyroyal, oil of cloves, castor oil, lollacapop, or a half hundred
other concoctions, will assure you, tears in eyes, that his is the only
true faith.
Pages:
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86