at hand to pelt him with, we looked at him for a time in silent disgust; and then pushed forward.  Our perseverence was at last rewarded; for several rods farther on, we emerged upon a little level grassy nook among the brushwood, and by an extraordinary dispensation of fortune, the weeds and floating sticks, which elsewhere covered the pool, seemed to have drawn apart, and left a few yards of clear water just in front of this favored spot.  We sounded it with a stick; it was four feet deep; we lifted a specimen in our cupped hands; it seemed reasonably transparent, so we decided that the time for action was arrived.  But our ablutions were suddenly interrupted by ten thousand punctures, like poisoned needles, and the humming of myriads of over-grown mosquitoes, rising in all directions from their native mud and slime and swarming to the feast.  We were fain to beat a retreat with all possible speed.

We made toward the tents, much refreshed by the bath which the heat of the weather, joined to our prejudices, had rendered very desirable.

“What’s the matter with the captain? look at him!” said Shaw.  The captain stood alone on the prairie, swinging his hat violently around his head, and lifting first one foot and then the other, without moving from the spot.  First he looked down to the ground with an air of supreme abhorrence; then he gazed upward with a perplexed and indignant countenance, as if trying to trace the flight of an unseen enemy.  We called to know what was the matter; but he replied only by execrations directed against some unknown object.  We approached, when our ears were saluted by a droning sound, as if twenty bee-hives had been overturned at once.  The air above was full of large black insects, in a state of great commotion, and multitudes were flying about just above the tops of the grass blades.

“Don’t be afraid,” called the captain, observing us recoil.  “The brutes won’t sting.”

At this I knocked one down with my hat, and discovered him to be no other than a “dorbug”; and looking closer, we found the ground thickly perforated with their holes.

We took a hasty leave of this flourishing colony, and walking up the rising ground to the tents, found Delorier’s fire still glowing brightly.  We sat down around it, and Shaw began to expatiate on the admirable facilities for bathing that we had discovered, and recommended the captain by all means to go down there before breakfast in the morning.  The captain was in the act of remarking that he couldn’t have believed it possible, when he suddenly interrupted himself, and clapped his hand to his cheek, exclaiming that “those infernal humbugs were at him again.”  In fact, we began to hear sounds as if bullets were humming over our heads.  In a moment something rapped me sharply on the forehead, then upon the neck, and immediately I felt an indefinite number of sharp wiry claws in active motion, as if their owner were bent on pushing his explorations farther.  I seized