222 HOUSEHOLD INSECTS 



houses. The first correspondent writes as follows : " I am 

 writing to ask how to kill crickets. The house is built 

 almost level with the ground and crickets have been able 

 to get in the French windows, go up stairs on the rough 

 plaster walls, and get into all the cracks in the woodwork. 

 During August and September of last year I killed thirty 

 or forty crickets a day as they bred in the walls and I 

 feared they would eat clothing if left to themselves. Also 

 they kept us 1 awake at night." 



The second correspondent gives another and more 

 serious phase of annoyance from crickets. She says : " We 

 will be very glad to have you tell us how we may rid our 

 house of the common black crickets. They get into the 

 closets in some unaccountable way and destroy the cloth- 

 ing, both linen and woolen. After destroying every one 

 of them in the morning we go into the closets in the after- 

 noon to find as many more as formerly. They seem to 

 eat holes very similar to the moth." 



To many householders, the presence of a " cricket on the 

 hearth " is a source of pleasure, and in Spain it is said that 

 crickets are sometimes kept in cages much as we keep 

 canary birds. One might be quite ready to agree with the 

 first correspondent, however, that a multitude of crickets 

 with their peculiar chirpings could become anything but a 

 delight, especially at night. Again, the common black 

 cricket, as the second correspondent writes, often causes 

 serious injury to clothing. Lintner records an interesting 

 instance of this in the case of a common black cricket. 

 He says, "Wm. B. Marshall of the New York State 

 Museum at Albany, reports during a sojourn at Cape May, 

 New Jersey, in the month of July last, that a suit of clothes 

 belonging to a friend which had just been received from the 



