e taken for eagles.

The town has between thirty and forty thousand people living in it, and
the rain and Johnny crows between them keep off pestilence. Outside is a
large savannah or park, where the villas are of the successful men of
business. One of these belonged to my host, a cool airy habitation with
open doors and windows, overhanging portico, and rooms into which all
the winds might enter, but not the sun. A garden in front was shut off
from the savannah by a fence of bananas. At the gate stood as sentinel a
cabbage palm a hundred feet high; on the lawn mangoes, oranges, papaws,
and bread-fruit trees, strange to look at, but luxuriantly shady. Before
the door was a tree of good dimensions, whose name I have forgotten, the
stem and branches of which were hung with orchids which G---- had
collected in the woods. The borders were blazing with varieties of the
single hibiscus, crimson, pink, and fawn colour, the largest that I had
ever seen. The average diameter of each single flower was from seven to
eight inches. Wind streamed freely through the long sitting room, loaded
with the perfume of orange trees; on table and in bookcase the hand and
mind visible of a gifted and cultivated man. The particular room
assigned to myself would have been equally delightful but that my
possession of it was disputed even in daylight by mosquitoes, who for
bloodthirsty ferocity had a bad pre-eminence over the worst that I had
ever met with elsewhere. I killed one who was at work upon me, and
examined him through a glass. Bewick, with the inspiration of genius,
had drawn his exact likeness as the devil--a long black stroke for a
body, nick for neck, horns on the head, and a beak for a mouth, spindle
arms, and longer spindle legs, two pointed wings, and a tail. Line for
line there the figure was before me which in the unforgetable tailpiece
is driving the thief under the gallows, and I had a melancholy
satisfaction in identifying him. I had been warned to be on the look-out
for scorpions, centipedes, jiggers, and land crabs, who would bite me if
I walked slipperless over the floor in the dark. Of these I met with
none, either there or anywhere, but the mosquito of Trinidad is enough
by himself. For malice, mockery, and venom of tooth and trumpet, he is
without a match in the world.

From mosquitoes, however, one could seek safety in tobacco smoke, or
hide behind the lace curtains with which every bed is provided.
Otherwise I found e