Mine Enemies 125 
with water, I entered the detective service. Many times a day 
I went out, and found the garden heliotrope and Spirea sal- 
icifolia swarming; also the beetles were strolling up and down 
the stems of the Asperula hexaphylla, and gnawing great bites 
out of the Chrysanthemum maximum. They do not attack 
the half wild red Lancaster and cinnamon roses, and I thought 
I had cleared the garden of them before the choicer roses 
appeared, when I discovered new relays on the goutweed, 
mallow, meadow-rue, and hundreds of them on a Virginia 
creeper. Not that the rose-bug likes Virginia creeper; but, 
as an enemy, he finds a vine over my favorite seat a vulnerable 
point to attack. Everywhere save in the heart of roses, where 
we are bidden to search for the evil one, do we find it. Rose- 
bug, forsooth! It is no such dainty epicure as that; it should be 
called Omnivorous Bug, for it samples everything, even your- 
self if you stay any length of time. But you don’t, for another 
pestiferous creature drives you frantic and you escape in- 
doors. I do not know its name, but it looks like a triangular 
fly with a small head and broad spreading transparent wings 
with dark spots, and it circles around your head and lights on 
your arm or back and bites as no gentle rose-bug ever thought 
of biting. There is something malignant about this noisy fly, 
and it is seldom that you can get a full view of it. I have had 
them pursue me over a hundred feet and even fly in at the 
screen door after me. 
To return to the rose-bug: it flourishes a month or more, 
when the males die and the females descend into the earth to 
lay their eggs, come to the surface and die. The eggs hatch 
in twenty days, and the young larve begin to feed upon tender 
roots. In October they descend below the reach of frost 
where they remain until spring, gradually come to the sur- 
face, and in May are transformed into pup# and in June be- 
come beetles. Two remedies besides hand-picking into kero- 
