THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



heard her say to the landlady that she would not have anything 

 more to do widi such a job. And the landlady said to her, "My 

 dear girl, when you took this place you must have known that 

 you would have to wait upon all sorts of impossible people." 

 That was rather a shock to half a dozen boys who had just 

 graduated from college. But another shock came later. I left the 

 party at Wilkes-Barre and went into a barber shop to get cleaned 

 up before taking the train for home. As I entered the shop, the 

 German barber greeted me enthusiastically and said, "Veil, old 

 man, how you vas?" I told him that I was very well and asked 

 him where he thought he had known me. "Oh, go 'vay, you 

 tended bar next my shop at de Exposition las' year." 



To go back to the post-graduate year. I don't think I ever 

 enjoyed a year more than that one. There were eight or ten 

 advanced students in Gage's laboratory, and we worked with 

 unequalled enthusiasm, inspired largely by Gage, and I got many 

 ideas that have proved of great value to me, and so, I am sure, 

 did the other men. Most of them went into medicine. 



At the end of the college year, in June, 1878, Professor C. V. 

 Riley, who had just been brought from Missouri to take the 

 post of Entomologist to the U. S. Department of Agriculture, 

 which had long been filled by the Englishman, Townend 

 Glover, was about to begin an investigation of the cotton cater- 

 pillar in the south. He knew Professor Comstock from having 

 given the non-resident lectures at Cornell referred to in an 

 earlier paragraph, and wrote to him offering him a job as Field 

 Agent in the southern cotton fields during the long summer 

 vacation. Comstock accepted, went South and spent most of the 

 summer in Selma, Alabama, sticking to his work indomitably 

 in spite of the fact that it was a yellow fever summer and con- 

 ditions throughout the southern states were very alarming. 



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