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exception, and that was in my first realisation of a 

 flight of locusts. As far as my neglect of taking a 

 memorandum respecting the time will permit me to be 

 accurate, I think the first instance in which I beheld 

 this famine-portending host was in 1810, at Caunpore, 

 in the East Indies. Their approach was signified by 

 the cloudy appearance of the heavens towards the north. 

 As the invaders came nearer the sky became more 

 obscure, till at length, when they might be said to be 

 contending with us for the possession of our canton- 

 ments, they covered, or rather animated, the whole 

 visible atmosphere with so dense and overwhelming a 

 multitude, that it became suddenly as dark as the 

 evening twilight. The elevation in which they moved 

 appeared to be from about ten feet, to one or, perhaps, 

 two or even three hundred feet above the earth ; the 

 whole of which height, in every possible direction, was. 

 so thickly occupied by these rapacious freebooters 

 that it appeared impossible in any part to thrust a 

 finger in the interstices between the bodies. This 

 flight, which was from north to south, continued for the 

 space, if I do not err, of three days, during which time, 

 though moving with their usual rapidity, the cloud was 

 equally dense. One fact struck me forcibly at the 

 time, as affording a faint idea of the innumerable mul- 

 titude of these creatures, that though the tired, and 

 maimed, and wounded fell on the ground in such pro- 

 portions that it was impossible to walk out for several 

 days after without crushing as many of them as could 

 lie in the space measured by four feet, yet this defal- 

 cation caused no apparent diminution in the invading 

 army. Had I not seen the main body of the volitants 

 I should have considered the prostrate lingerers to be 

 the nearest approach to infinitude I could imagine ; 

 but I should think that these did not amount to the 



