104 LAKV.E OF CRANE-FLIES. 



present stature. Be it remembered, that perfect insects never 

 grow ; and to commence from the beginning the life of a Fa- 

 ther 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,* 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 accustomed, 

 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 in- 

 fluence of fairy footsteps, they turn the green sward brown by 

 invisible workings, quite as withering as were once esteemed 

 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 cutting off of 

 hay-crop promises by the trenchant jaws of crane-fly de- 

 vourers in their grubhood. 



But the longlegs himself is harmless ? Why, no ; inasmuch 

 as he, and his long-legged mate, are the parents of these ver- 

 dure-blighting imps. 



If we look at the slender bodies of different Tipulcc of the 

 same species, we shall perceive that some of them are truncated, 

 or as if cut off at the end, while others are finished by a sharp 



* Larvee of Tlpula. See Vignette. 



