314 MOSQUITOS A ‘ CAUTION,’ 
fly (Tabanus), the tiny burning fly (beulot or 
sand-fly of the trappers), and the well-known 
and deservedly-hated mosquito, are capable of 
inflicting. 
A wanderer from my boyhood, I have met with 
these pests in various parts of our globe—in the 
country of Czernomorzi, among the Black Sea 
Cossacks, on the plains of Troy, up on Mount 
Olympus, amid the gorgeous growths of a tro- 
pical forest, where beauty and malaria, twin 
brothers, walk hand-in-hand—away in the deep 
dismal solitudes of the swamps on the banks of 
the Mississippi, on the wide grassy tracts of the 
Western prairies, and on the snow-clad summits 
of the Rocky Mountains. 
Widely remote and singularly opposite as to 
climate as are these varied localities, yet, as these 
pests are there in legions, I imagined that I had 
endured the maximum of misery they were 
capable of producing. I was mistaken; all my 
experience, all my vaunted knowledge of their 
numbers, all I had seen and suffered, was as 
nothing to what I subsequently endured. On 
the Sumass prairie, and along the banks of the 
Fraser river, the mosquitos are, as a Yankee 
would say, ‘a caution.’ 
In the summer our work, that of cutting the 
