248 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



central Ohio, I remember that neither my playmates nor myself 

 doubted, when we saw dragon-flies darting to and fro or hover- 

 ing over ponds or swamp-lands, that they were carrying food to 

 their friends the snakes ; and the sight of a snake-feeder always 

 put those who feared snakes on their guard. 



Some years ago a friend of mine was spending the night in 

 Boston. Her hostess advised her, upon retiring, to be sure and 

 keep the bedclothes well over her feet during the night, as the 

 house was infested with cockroaches, and it was said that the in- 

 sects would gnaw one's toe-nails if opportunity offered. This sug- 

 gests a rather popular New England superstition that if you kill 

 a cricket the rest of the tribe will come unawares and bite holes 

 in your clothes. We find the same superstition in Ireland. The 

 Irish in general say that it is very lucky to have crickets come to 

 take up their abode in your premises, only you must be very care- 

 ful not to injure one. A young Irishman once told me that if by 

 chance boiling water were spilled upon one, as might easily hap- 

 pen among the peasants who cook by an open fire, about the 

 hearth of which the crickets like to live, the unlucky person who 

 had done the injury would be sure to find that the crickets had 

 gnawed holes in his socks and other garments during his sleep ; 

 at the same time and in the same room the clothes of other per- 

 sons who had not harmed the crickets would be unmolested. A 

 Maine saying is that, if one of the sprightly elves become impris- 

 oned in some crevice, ill-fortune will surely attend any bystander 

 who does not release him. In some places with us the cricket is 

 said to be propitious, but there is a Maine belief that its chirping 

 foretells sorrow. This is a probable outgrowth of the saddening 

 effect of long-continued listening to the little reveler's music, so 

 mingled in its cheer and pathos. We may pretty certainly con- 

 clude that our whimsies about the cricket have in the main been 

 directly transplanted from the British Isles, while those of the 

 latter region are, in turn, modified versions of ancient ancestral 

 beliefs common to many branches of the Aryan race. In White's 

 Selborne the author says, in speaking of crickets : " They are the 

 housewife's barometer, foretelling her when it will rain ; and are 

 prognostic sometimes, she thinks, of ill or good luck, of the death 

 of a near relation, or of the approach of an absent lover." Among 

 various prognostications of death recounted in the poet Gray's 

 Pastoral Dirge we find — 



" And shrilling crickets in the chimney cried." 



The Spectator says that the voice of the cricket has inspired more 

 terror than the roaring of a lion. According to Pliny, the cricket 

 was an insect greatly esteemed by ancient magicians. 



It is often said that the house-fly is indigestible by the human 



