great trembling shafts of glory.  Being on horseback and alone, for my companion had trotted on in his waggon, I had time to watch and note this brilliant spectacle; but as soon as the sun had dipped beneath the sea of verdure an ominous sound caused me to gallop on with increasing haste.  The pony seemed to know the significance of that sound much better than its rider.  He no longer lagged, nor needed the spur or whip to urge him to faster exertion, for darker and denser than on the previous night there rose around us vast numbers of mosquitoes—­choking masses of biting insects, no mere cloud thicker and denser in one place than in another, but one huge wall of never-ending insects filling nostrils, ears, and eyes.  Where they came from I cannot tell; the prairie seemed too small to hold them; the air too limited to yield them space.  I had seen many vast accumulations of insect life in lands old and new, but never any thing that approached to this mountain of mosquitoes on the prairies of Dakota.  To say that they covered the coat of the horse I rode would be to give but a faint idea of their numbers; they were literally six or eight deep upon his skin, and with a single sweep of the hand one could crush myriads from his neck.  Their hum seemed to be in all things around.  To ride for it was the sole resource.  Darkness came quickly down, but the track knew no turn, and for seven miles I kept the pony at a gallop; my face, neck, and hands cut and bleeding.

At last in the gloom I saw, down in what appeared to be the bottom of a valley, a long white wooden building, with lights showing out through the windows.  Riding quickly down this valley we reached, followed by hosts of winged pursuers, the edge of some water lying amidst tree-covered banks-the water was the Red River, and the white wooden building the steamboat “International.”

Now one word about mosquitoes in the valley of the Red River.  People will be inclined to say, “We know well what a mosquito is—­very troublesome and annoying, no doubt, but you needn’t make so much of what every one understands.”  People reading what I have written about this insect will probably say this.  I would have said so myself before the occurrences of the last two nights, but I will never say so again, nor perhaps will my readers when they have read the following:  It is no unusual event during a wet summer in that portion of Minnesota and Dakota to which I refer for oxen and horses to perish from the bites of mosquitoes.  An exposure of a very few hours duration is sufficient to cause death to these animals.  It is said, too, that not many years ago the Sioux were in the habit of sometimes killing their captives by exposing them at night to the attacks of the mosquitoes; and any person who has experienced the full intensity of a mosquito night along the American portion of the Red River will not have any difficulty in realizing how short a period would be necessary to cause death.