day, on cutting down a
hollow pine tree, my gardener called me to look at a perfect jet of
white ants, which like a small fountain, welled up from the middle
of the decayed stump, and flowed over it in a thick stream to the
ground. As far north as Lenox, in Berkshire, the summer heat brings
humming-birds and rattlesnakes; and of less deadly, but very little
less disagreeable, serpent-beasts, I have encountered there no fewer
than eight, in a short mile walk, on a warm September morning,
genial even for snakes.

The succession of creatures I have enumerated is the normal
entomology of an average Pennsylvania summer. But there came a year,
a horrible year, shortly before my last return to England, when the
Colorado beetle (_alias_ potato-bug), having marched over the whole
width of the continent, from the far West to the Atlantic
sea-board, made its appearance in the neighborhood of Philadelphia.
These loathsome creatures, varying in size from a sixpence to a
shilling, but rather oval than round in shape, of a pinkish-colored
flesh, covered with a variegated greenish-brown shell, came in such
numbers that the paths in the garden between the vegetable beds
seemed to _swim_ with them, and made me giddy to look at them. They
devoured everything, beginning with the potatoes; and having
devastated the fields and garden, betook themselves to swarming up
the walls of the house, for what purpose they alone could tell--but
didn't. In vain men with ladders went up and scraped them down into
buckets of hot water; they seemed inexhaustible, and filled me with
such disgust that I felt as if I must fly, and abandon the place to
them. I do not think this pest lasted much more than a week; then,
having devoured, they departed, still making towards the sea, and
were described to me by a gentleman who drove along the road, as
literally covering the highway, like a disbanded army. One's
familiar sensations under this visitation were certainly "crawling
and creeping"; it is a great pity that flying might not have been
added to them.]

BRANCHTOWN, Monday, August 29th, 1836.
DEAREST H----,

You are in Italy! in that land which, from the earliest time I can
remember, has been the land of my dreams; and it seems strange to me
that you should be there, and I here; for when we were