216 THE COTTON CATERPILLAR. 
first, this having attained its luxuriance through the application 
of guano. He says the Yankees are so much in a hurry to make 
money that they use more guano than they ought. Yankees, 
guano, caterpillars and carpet- -baggers are all associated together 
in his mind. He will not steal guano for this same reason, that 
he believes it breeds the caterpillars. 
We have tried several methods of checking them, but none did 
much good. We built fires at night around our fields to attract 
the moths, but they did not seem much inclined to commit suicide. 
We hired hands to examine the plants and pick off the leaves 
having eggs on them, but it was a slow and useless job. We 
heard that insects could not endure the smell of the castor bean 
plant and so planted rows of them through the fields, but it did no 
good ; on the contrary, they rather liked it. In fact the only effec- 
tual remedy was by picking off the worms theinselyes, thus check- 
ing their spread. But one hundred hands picking all day would 
not gather more than two or three barrels, and at night there 
seemed to be just as many in the field, though their increase was 
evidently lessened. Perhaps you say “why not apply carbolic acid 
to the plants?” We have tried that too, but’ you might as well 
attempt to put out a burning house with a pocket syringe, as to - 
sprinkle a field of a hundred acres. How to keep them off, or how 
to destroy them after they have come, has not yet been discovered. 
` No one who has not seen them at work, can conceive of the 
devastation they commit. We have had a field of over one hun- 
dred acres eaten out so clean by them in ten days’ time, that it 
had the appearance of having been burnt over by fire. To-day 
you see only a few here and there; in less than a week the ground, 
with every cotton plant and other bush, is one squirming mass of 
worms. They are born to devour and most faithfully do they 
execute their mission. When they are in full blast, the air in a 
cotton-field is filled with a sickening odor of the macerated leaves, 
and I have thought I could hear the noise of their eating and 
crawling. I have seen ditches a foot deep for miles, filled to the 
top with drowned worms, and in one instance the wagon rut for 
eight miles or more was full of a wriggling mass of them. Dogs, 
geese, turkeys and birds thrive on them, and forsake all other food 
= -forthem. The negroes’ dogs get fat on them alone ; the rice birds 
desert me rice fields in thousands, preférring the worms to the 
Adapted from the Boston da apace 
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