life of the adult insect is very short” and that it is the female who stings.  The Doctor is a born instructor.  We learn that “the natural food of the mosquito is a drop or two of the juice of a plant.”  We suspect the Doctor of fagging up on “Mosquito” out of some convent dictionary while we have been at Fond du Lac.  He is like the parson introduced by his friend of the cloth.  “Brother Jones will now give an address on Satan.  I bespeak for him your courteous attention, as the reverend gentleman has been preparing this address for weeks, and comes to you full of his subject."

The adult mosquito may have a short life, but it is a life crammed full of interest; if the natural food of the mosquito is the sweet juice of a pretty flower then a lot of them in this latitude are imperilling their digestion on an unnatural commissariat.  And if the female mosquitoes do all the fine work, there is a great scarcity of male mosquitoes on Smith’s portage, and once more in the North the suffragette comes into her own.  We fear that these mosquitoes are like the Indians of whom a Slave River priest had said to us, “These have not delicate sensibilities such as gratitude and affection, but they have a proper appreciation of material things.”

Opposition is the life of trade.  For every vantage-point as big as a match-head on our face and hands the “bull-dog” contests with the mosquito.  An interesting study is the “bull-dog.”  He looks like a cross between a blue-bottle fly and a bumble bee, and we took leisure as we went along to examine the different parts of his person under a microscope that some one carried as a watch-charm.  The head of the insect (if he is an insect) looks exactly like that of a bull-dog, he makes his perforation with a five-bladed lancet, and he is good workman enough to keep his tools always well sharpened.  The Doctor was not “long” on the “bull-dog.”  He told us that his Sunday name was “Tabanus,” and that was about all he could impart.  The rest we could learn for ourselves by direct contact.

Personally I have very little rancour against the “bull-dog.”  He looks worse than he is, and an adversary armed with hands can easily repel him.  Four-legged brutes find it different.  On the Bloody Portage we overtook five teams of oxen which had been more than twelve hours trying to make sixteen miles and were bleeding profusely from the fly-bites.  Finally two of them succumbed and a relief team had to be sent out from Fort Smith.  Moose in the North, maddened by the “bull-dogs,” often jump over precipices and river-banks, as the Scriptural swine did when they were possessed of devils.

Johnny-Come-Lately from dear old Lunnon reading in a Western paper, “The deer are chased into the water by the bull-dogs,” ruminates audibly, “Chase the de-ah into the wa-tah with bull-dogs!  How interesting!  Jolly resourceful beggars, these Colonials.”  A literary scientist sending out copy from the North wrote, “My two greatest troubles are mosquitoes and bull-dogs,” which the intelligent proof-reader amended into, “My two greatest troubles are mosquitoes and bull-frogs.”