CHAPTER XXX. 



Midges and other Bloodsuckers — The Tsetse of South Africa — The Abyssinia Zinth — 

 Livingstone — Adders and Grass Snakes — Lucan's Pharsalia — Celsus — Legend of St. 

 John ante Portant Laiinajn. 



Along the west coast the weather is now [May 1872] as mild and 

 May-like as you could wi.sh ; the swallow twitters gaily in the sun- 

 light, and when he ceases his zig-zag flight for a moment to rest on 

 chimney-top or house-ridge, he sings a gladsome song, low and faiut 

 indeed, and frequently lost on that account in the general chorus, 

 but exceedingly sweet and musical, as you wiU find if you give it 

 the attention it merits ; while in the distance you hear the cheery 

 notes of the cuckoo, wild and startling as yet, as they burst 

 suddenly upon the ear from out the woodland glade or from the 

 old rowan tree that finds root room, you wonder how, in yonder 

 crevice in the rock above the foaming waterfall, but soon to 

 become familiar as the season advances, and pressed upon your 

 notice whether you will or no, and at all sorts of impossible times 

 and places, by the truant schoolboy's oft-repeated, though rarely 

 successful, attempts at imitation. For the first week in May the 

 temperature is unusually high, and we do not recollect ever before 

 having seen insect life so plentiful so early ia the season. Midges, 

 gadflies, and other bloodsuckers are already astir in their thousands, 

 their taste for their favourite fluid keen and unabated, as they fail 

 not abundantly to manifest by an activity that one cannot help 

 admiring, even while wishing that it could possibly be directed to a 

 more legitimate and less personally annoying cud. But " 'tis their 

 nature to," as the hymn-book says, and we must grin and bear it, 



