anced to
break the skin with his nails. The venom of the viper is poisonous to
its own blood; and in like manner, the malignity of the demon afflicted
his own flesh with a festering pain. The slight anguish gave him a
thought. "Ha! now I have it!" he cried; "now I will be quits with him!"
He caused, accordingly, a boggy moss to grow in the hollows of this
dreary land, and made this to generate in countless multitudes a small,
winged, venomous fiend, named _mosquito_. "Ahriman is victor, after
all!" he shouted, as the humming imps trooped forth upon the air.

I think he was!

Delighted with this success, the demon tried to repeat it in other
lands; but it fared with him as with every genius, good or bad, who
begins to repeat himself: the imitation was but a feeble copy of the
original. The mosquito of Labrador would spoil Eden itself. The imitated
fiend I am indifferent to, but from the original spare me!

We were spared in a degree. Ormuzd turned the weapons of his enemy
against himself: rain, hail, and snow fought for us against the
mosquito; but when fair weather came, this pest came with it. It is
clear that Dante was not a man of genius! Otherwise he would have put
the mosquito (the original, of course) in his "Inferno."

_Ennui_ is always to be suffered on a long voyage. We had it, enough of
it, and to spare, yet always broken by days of high delight.

During the early part of the voyage, while we were still sailing, or
even during considerable detentions in harbor, there was, novelty and
incident enough to give the mind employment. The weather was fine; the
sun shone; we lived on deck, in company with sun, sea, sky, horizon; and
the mere relief from the narrowness of in-door life, the wide fellowship
with the elements in which we were established, sufficed of themselves
to invest our days with an unfailing charm. I was peculiarly happy, for
I love the sea. All its ordinary aspects delight me in a very deep and
heartfelt way. These were varied in the present instance with much that
to me was far from being ordinary. Ever there was some ascending shore,
some towering island or prodigious cliff, some enticing bird, some
magnificence of morning or evening; and besides all these and a hundred
attractions more, there were the beauty and terror of berg and
floe-field, the marvel of the ice. For a time, therefore, all was
enchantment. If we made a harbor, if we left one, expectation sailed
with us; we fancied new sce