1874,
when I was residing close to the home of my early married life,
Butler Place, when the ants appeared in such numbers in the
dining-room sideboards, closets, cupboards, etc., that we were
compelled to isolate all cakes, biscuits, sugar, preserves, fruit,
and whatever else was kept in them, by placing the vessels
containing all such things in dishes of water--moats, in fact, by
which the enemy was cut off from these supplies. Immediately to
these succeeded swarms of fire-flies, beautiful and wonderful in
their evening apparition of showers of sparks from every bush and
shrub, and after sunset rising in hundreds from the grass, and
glittering against the dark sky as if the Milky Way had gone mad and
taken to dancing; but even these shining creatures were not pleasant
in the house by day, where they were merely like ill-shaped ugly
black flies. These were followed by a world of black beetles of
every size and shape, with which our room was alive as soon as the
lights were brought in the evening. Net curtains, and muslin
stretched over wooden frames, and fixed like blinds in the
window-sashes, did indeed keep out the poor mouthful of stifling air
for which we were gasping, but did not exclude these intolerable
visitors, who made their way in at every crack and crevice and
momentarily opened door, and overran with a dreadful swiftness the
floor of the room in every direction; occasionally taking to the
more agreeable exercise of flying, at which, however, they did not
seem quite expert, frequently tumbling down and struggling by twos
and threes upon one's hair, neck, and arms, and especially attracted
to unfortunate females by white or light-colored muslin gowns, which
became perfect receptacles for them as they rushed and rattled over
the matting. After the reign of the beetles came that of the flies,
a pest to make easily credible the ancient story of the Egyptian
plague. Every picture and looking-glass frame, every morsel of
gilding, every ornamental piece of metal about the rooms, had to be
covered, like the tarts in a confectioner's shop, with yellow gauze;
whatever was not so protected--unglazed photographs, the surface of
oil pictures, necessary memoranda, and papers on one's
writing-table--became black with the specks and spots left by these
creatures. Plates of fly-pape