Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 144.djvu/89

1888.] from insect plagues; but these are mostly limited to cool mountain-ranges, accessible only at intervals, or to a favoured few. I have myself lived where at certain seasons the dinner-table became a pandemonium of insects, flying in to the light – crickets and grasshoppers, beetles and earwigs, black restless things with pincers in their heads, and flights of aromatic bugs; and I have travelled where the plague was so great that, as soon as the sun went down, you were driven perforce to retire for the night to the shelter of your mosquito-curtains.

As well might one count the grains of sand as the unnumbered hosts of Indian insects. The roughest classification and a few stray samples must suffice to shadow faintly the wonders and the penalties of their ever-present society.

There are the insects that permanently share your house – ants and flies, spiders and mosquitoes, beetles and cockroaches. One there is, the white ant, which besieges your house and all that is in it like an ever-watchful enemy: there are those that pay you flying visits when your bright lamps call them in, and those that in the garden keep you on guard not less for yourself than for your plants. The active life by which you are thus surrounded is a source always of annoyance, sometimes of torment, yet often enough of wonder and admiration. It has even endowed the Anglo-Indian with a new sense. What is that strange caution which makes his eye unconsciously search the corners of the room he enters for the first time? or makes him hesitate as he takes the verandah chair in the dusk of the evening? What causes him to grasp his bath-sponge so warily? or to tap his unworn shoes on the floor before putting them on? Is it not that every sheltered corner and every cool recess suggests irresistibly the presence of some unwelcome guest?

There comes a time, however, when you have accepted India for better for worse; when, so far as possible, you wear your burdens "like a hat aside," and when you find new interest in observing the nature and the ways even of your insect fellow-creatures. Especially is this the case if you take pleasure in a flower-garden, the source of one of the purest and most satisfactory of Indian pastimes. There you cannot fail to be attracted every day by new revelations of the insect world, of which the variety seems almost as inexhaustible as the combinations of music.

Once in twenty years a vision of some winged thing of exquisite form and colour and grace will flash on your sight – some unknown species never seen before or since – as if alighted from another planet. Is it possible that there are whole families of such creatures? Where and how do they live? Or is it a chance offshoot of better known tribes, a "sport," like some beautiful hybrid plant developed unawares by an amateur gardener? I remember a shrub in my garden, which used at intervals to burst suddenly into a profusion of sweet-scented flowers. Jealously I kept away from this shrub any visitor with a taste for entomology or butterfly-hunting, and alone I used to enjoy the contemplation of the gay crowd of happy creatures that flocked to feed on the honey. As you approached the tree the air was filled with the hum of a myriad insects, and the faint cream-coloured flowers were seen to be alive with winged things of every shape and