LAEVM OF CRANE FLIES. 309 



wings, they may assist in the production of that buzzing 

 sound, to account for which has puzzled not a few philoso- 

 phers. But, however this may be with the two- winged band 

 in general, the little knobbed articles, to which we are now 

 directing special notice, are not thus employed, seeing that 

 it cannot be said of the crane-fly, as of some other fliers, and 

 of that celebrated lady, "with rings on her fingers and bells 

 on her toes," that "the < longlegs' makes music wherever 

 he goes." 



Those who behold the crane-fly only in its proper person 

 in the elevated maturity of its stilted supporters must not 

 suppose it has been always thus exalted above its fellows, nor 

 must they imagine it to have grown by degrees to its present 

 stature. Be it remembered, that perfect insects never grow ; 

 and to commence from the beginning the life of a Father 

 Longlegs, we must go back upon a period when he had not a 

 leg to boast of; when he and his skipping comrades, now 

 giving double life, by their gymnastics, to the grass they sport 

 in, were all buried underneath it in the form of legless, 

 wingless grubs, 1 doing their best, by gnawing at its roots, to 

 deprive this very grass of its own quiet measure of vegetable 

 vitality. In fact, these harmless-looking idlers are accus- 

 tomed, in their state of infancy, to play very serious pranks, 

 though neither by daylight nor by moonlight, under cover 

 of the suffering herbage. Exactly in reverse of the fertilizing 

 influence of fairy footsteps, they turn the green sward brown 

 by invisible workings, quite as withering as were once es- 

 teemed the fabled mischiefs of the brownies themselves ; and 

 it is not unlikely that to those, or other the like imaginary 

 agents, was often ascribed, in days of yore, the occasional cut- 

 ting off of hay-crop promises by the trenchant jaws of crane- 

 fly devourers in their grubhood. 



But the longlegs himself is harmless ? Why, no ; inas- 



1 Larvae of Tipula. See Vignette. 



