XL. INSECTS MOLESTING FARM ANIMALS 
“Thou'rt welcome to the town; but why come here 
To bleed a brother poet, gaunt like thee? 
Alas! the little blood I have is dear, 
And thin will be the banquet drawn from me.” 
—Bryant (To a Mosquito). 
In the season of black-flies, no one goes into the North 
Woods except on business; though it is late spring and the 
flowers are blooming everywhere and all the world is fresh 
and inviting, the flies are in the woods by day, and the 
mosquitos and punkies are there by night, and there is no 
peace of life for man or beast. The lumber-jacks, who must 
labor there to earn a living, smear themselves with tar-oil 
and other fly-repellants. The wild deer leave the streams 
and adjacent woods and go far out among the rushes in 
the open marsh, and stand half immersed in the water. 
The hogs in their pens root up the bottom of the pools and 
trample and roll it into a soft paste, and coat themselves 
thickly with mud. This 
is fly-proof. The bison, 
also, in days gone by, 
wallowed in the mud 
about spring-holes, 
attaining by like inad- 
mirable procedure the 
same desirable end— 
immunity. 
Fly-time, fortunately, 
is fleeting. Early spring 
and late summer and 
autumn are more or less 
ia. 116. A mosquito. free from blood-sucking 
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