TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS. 379 



Still a third method of driving off mosquitoes is to place 

 a piece of gum camphor in a tin cup, and hold it over a 

 lamp until a vapor begins to rise (don't let it take fire) and 

 then wave the cup to and fro about the room until the air 

 smells strongly of camphor. 



We have found both powder and camphor very effective, 

 though we have fortunately seldom been compelled to re- 

 sort to them, and never except from carelessness in leaving 

 windows open and unprotected, with a bright light in the 

 room. 



Even in the worst places in Florida, and during the 

 height of the mosquito season, no one need be driven to 

 the last resort of the natives of Lower Senegal. They go 

 to roost, literally. During the several months when mos- 

 quitoes are on the war-path in deadly earnest, the unlucky 

 human beings of that region are taught their own insig- 

 nificance, and are compelled to retreat before their tiny 

 foe. They set up regular roosts, or platforms, built on 

 high forked saplings, reached by ladders, and floored with 

 branches, and under these lofty platforms perpetual fires 

 are kept burning ; here the poor people have to live night 

 and day, constantly enveloped in a dense smoke. 



Squatted on their roosts they receive their friends during 

 the day, passing hurriedly from one roost to the other, and 

 never venturing out of range of the smoke, least they be 

 eaten up alive ; at night they stretch themselves on their 

 platform, and sleep in the midst of smoke and warm air, 

 with the stars above them and a fire below them. Query : 

 Suppose the children should roll out of bed ? It would be 

 something like, " out of the frying-pan into the fire," would 

 it not? 



And now, in bidding farewell to the mosquito question, 

 we will quote from "Sketches of Travel in Singapore, 

 Malacca, Java," by a well-known German traveler, F. 



