68 THE TRIBES ON MY FRONTIER. 



beetles, and flies, but Dr. George Smith could not make a 

 biography out of them. No animal abhors the honest light 

 of day more cordially than the common bat. Even Lucifuga 

 blatta, the cockroach, will creep out from its hiding-place 

 under the table when it smells that the lid has been left off 

 the butter-dish ; and as for the owl, that bird of night, I 

 never saw one yet, any hour of the twenty-four, which had 

 not a very large round eye fixed on me. But a bat in day- 

 light feels worse than Hercules when he put on the coat with 

 which his spouse presented him and suffered prickly heat. 

 The prophet who says that the people will cast their idols 

 to the moles and to the bats must have been a naturalist. 

 Nature furnishes no more striking figure. Terminus and 

 Priapus will lie neglected and half buried in the earth, ob- 

 structing the burrowing mole, while the Lares and Penates 

 will be put away with other rubbish in some old lumber- 

 room or garret, heavy with the smell of long-unmolested 

 bats. 



Catching bats with a butterfly-net and examining them 

 is a good pastime for cold weather evenings. There are more 

 kinds of them than I can tell the use of, small ones and 

 smaller ones, largish ones with yellow breasts, pug-nosed 

 ones and others with more prominent snouts, some thick 



