A MAGNIFYING FANCY. 255 



Only suppose, thought we, pursuing the train of fancy 

 brought and left behind by the gauze- winged sylph ; suppose, 

 that by the touch of some Circe's wand, all the insect forms 

 creeping and flying and floating around us now less seen than 

 heard and felt were all at once enlarged to the proportions 

 they assume to the eye in that amusing raree-show, the solar 

 microscope verily we should feel somewhat ill at ease in the 

 strange company wherein we should figure then as insects 

 most insignificant as performers playing certainly no first 

 fiddle. 



' Gorgon and hydra and chimera dire " 



would not then exist only in the realms of imagination ; but 

 fill to suffocation the atmospheric and the aqueous fluids, and 

 walk in appalling reality on the solid earth. And amidst the 

 crowd of shapes terrific, small, we take it, would be our incli- 

 nation to single out for admiration such among them as our 

 lace-winged elegante ; or, with the poet, to admire in 



" The beetle panoplied in gems of gold," 



the semblance of 



" A mailed angel on a battle day." 



At this moment a host not of angels but of blood-thirsty 

 demons in the shape of gnats rose from the adjacent pond, 

 and passed across our face. Using our book as a weapon of 

 destruction, we felled a multitude to the earth ; and, in com- 

 pletion of our angry purpose, trampled many of our fallen 



