One of them flew into my mouth, the other night, and sting me
far down in my throat; but luckily I coughed him up in halves. They are
bigger than American mosquitoes; and if you crush them, after one of
their feasts, it makes a terrific bloodspot. It is a sort of suicide--at
least, a shedding of one's own blood--to kill them; but it gratifies the
old Adam to do it. It shocks me to feel how revengeful I am; but it is
impossible not to impute a certain malice and intellectual venom to these
diabolical insects. I wonder whether our health, at this season of the
year, requires that we should be kept in a state of irritation, and so
the mosquitoes are Nature's prophetic remedy for some disease; or whether
we are made for the mosquitoes, not they for us. It is possible, just
possible, that the infinitesimal doses of poison which they infuse into
us are a homoeopathic safeguard against pestilence; but medicine never
was administered in a more disagreeable way.
The moist atmosphere about the Arno, I suppose, produces these insects,
and fills the broad, ten-mile valley with them; and as we are just on the
brim of the basin, they overflow into our windows.
Pages:
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659