Any mesh coarser than cheese-cloth will prove
pregnable to the most enterprising of the smaller species.]
Suspend this affair inside your tent by means of cords or tapes. Drop
it about you. Spread it out. Lay rod-cases, duffel-bags, or rocks along
its lower edges to keep it spread. You will sleep beneath it like a
child in winter. No driving out of reluctant flies; no enforced early
rising; no danger of a single overlooked insect to make the midnight
miserable. The cheese-cloth weighs almost nothing, can be looped up out
of the way in the daytime, admits the air readily. Nothing could fill
the soul with more ecstatic satisfaction than to lie for a moment
before going to sleep listening to a noise outside like an able-bodied
sawmill that indicates the _ping-gosh_ are abroad.
It would be unfair to leave the subject without a passing reference to
its effect on the imagination. We are all familiar with comic paper
mosquito stories, and some of them are very good. But until actual
experience takes you by the hand and leads you into the realm of pure
fancy, you will never know of what improvisation the human mind is
capable.
The picture rises before my mind of the cabin of a twenty-eight-foot
cutter-sloop just before the dawn of a midsummer day. The sloop was
made for business, and the cabin harmonized exactly with the
sloop--painted pine, wooden bunks without mattresses, camp-blankets,
duffel-bags slung up because all the floor place had been requisitioned
for sleeping purposes.
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