Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 4).djvu/310

 the thirty tall cotton wood trees it contains. It is covered with brush, through which is an old path from one end to the other. A quantity of drift wood lies on its upper end, which projecting, forms a fine boat harbour just below it, quite out of the current. There are but few musquitoes on the dry part, but a low, drowned point, covered with small poplars, and extending a hundred yards at the lower end swarms with them, and many of the largest size, called gannipers. These venemous and troublesome insects remind me of a humorous story I have heard, which I take the liberty of introducing here.

Some gentlemen in South Carolina had dined together, and while the wine circulated freely after dinner the conversation turned on the quantity of musquitoes generated in the rice swamps of that country. One of the gentlemen said that those insects never troubled him, and that he believed people in general complained more of them than they had occasion to do—that for his part he would not notice them, were he naked in a rice swamp. Another of the company (according to the custom of the country, where all arguments terminate in a wager) offered him a considerable bet that he would not lie quietly on his face, naked, in the swamp, a quarter of an hour. The other took him up, and all the party immediately adjourned to the place fixed on. The gentleman stripped, lay down, and bore with the most resolute fortitude the attack of the hostile foe. The time had almost expired, and his antagonist fearing he must lose his wager, seized a fire brand from one of the negro fires that happened to be near, and approaching slyly applied it to a fleshy part of his prostrate adversary, who, not able to bear the increased pain, clapped his hand on the part, jumped up, and cried out "A ganniper by G." He then acknowledged he had lost his wager, by that "damned ganniper," and the party returned to the house