"
I agree with Billy. One mosquito in a tent can keep you awake for
hours.
As to protection, it is varied enough in all conscience, and always
theoretically perfect. A head-net falling well down over your chest, or
even tied under your arm-pits, is at once the simplest and most
fallacious of these theories. It will keep vast numbers of flies out,
to be sure. It will also keep the few adventurous discoverers in, where
you can neither kill nor eject. Likewise you are deprived of your pipe;
and the common homely comfort of spitting on your bait is totally
denied you. The landscape takes on the prismatic colours of refraction,
so that, while you can easily make out red, white, and blue Chinese
dragons and mythological monsters, you are unable to discover the more
welcome succulence, say, of a partridge on a limb. And the end of that
head-net is to be picked to holes by the brush, and finally to be
snatched from you to sapling height, whence your pains will rescue it
only in a useless condition. Probably then you will dance the war-dance
of exasperation on its dismembered remains. Still, there are times--in
case of straight-away river paddling, or open walking, or lengthened
waiting--when the net is a great comfort. And it is easily included in
the pack.
Next in order come the various "dopes." And they are various. From the
stickiest, blackest pastes to the silkiest, suavest oils they range,
through the grades of essence, salve, and cream.
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