THE MAKERS OF SUMMER. 229 
that it is the true one, for they may look at matters in 
an entirely different manner from what we do. The 
effect of the cuckoo’s course is to cause an immense 
destruction of insects, and it is really one of the most 
valuable as well as the most welcome of all our birds. 
The thin pipe of the gnat heard at night is often 
alluded to,half in jest, by our older novelists. It is now, 
I think, dying out a good deal, and local where it stays. 
It occurred to me, on seeing some such allusion the other 
day, that it was six years since J had heard a gnat ina 
bedroom—never since we left a neighbourhood where 
there had once been marshy ground. Gnats are, how- 
ever, less common generally—exclusive, of course, of 
those places where there is much water. All things are 
local, insects particularly so. On clay soils the flies in 
summer are most trying ; black flies swarm on the eyes 
and lips, and in the deep lanes cannot be kept off 
without a green bough. It requires the utmost patience 
to stay there to observe anything. In a place where 
the soil was sand, with much heath, on elevated ground, 
there was no annoyance from flies. There were crowds 
of them, but they did not attack human beings. You 
might sit on a bank in the fields with endless insects 
passing without being irritated ; but everywhere out of 
doors you must listen for the peculiar low whir of the 
stoat-fly, who will fill his long grey body with your 
blood ina very few minutes. This is the tsetse of our 
woods. 
