re to be had there also. The rapidity with which they
collect from all parts and swoop down upon the dead carcase of an
animal is astonishing to witness. Their value as scavengers is great,
and in a very short time nothing is left of the carcase but bare
bones.

Crows are also useful as scavengers. Nevertheless, they are a great
nuisance, especially in Bombay. Their loud cawing is often most
distracting; but they are also bold thieves, and do not hesitate to
enter houses when they see their opportunity and to carry off any
portable article which comes first to hand, even when it is of no
possible use to them. Some of the birds of prey are beautiful objects,
on account of their size, and the boldness of their flight. Kites
wheel about in the air in large numbers around Poona. Since people
carry almost everything upon their heads, a kite not unfrequently
makes a sudden swoop and snatches a prize out of the basket.

Few people are allowed a gun license, so that birds are less afraid of
mankind than they are in England, and favourable opportunities
constantly occur of observing them near at hand. A great variety may
be met with in an ordinary country walk in the cultivated parts of
India where food is plentiful. Although they cannot sing, many of them
have quaint and charming personal characteristics.

CHAPTER XXVIII

INSECTS IN INDIA

Noise of insects at night. Troublesome in the evening. The
blister-fly. Bees. Wasps. Cockroaches. Ants in the bungalow.
White ants. Scorpions; their sting. Boys callous of the
feelings of insects. Bugs. Spiders. Mosquitoes. The
mosquito-net. Flies. The eye-fly. Insects resembling their
surroundings. Butterflies. The praying mantis.

Amidst the many sounds of the restless Indian night, some far away,
some near at hand, there is one which, when it commences, drowns all
the rest. It is a harsh, metallic, rasping, shrill, unmusical sound.
It might seem as if it had to do with some machinery, except that it
is unlike the sound of any machine that you ever heard. It begins in
the room where you are sitting reading, or else out in the verandah,
where you are enjoying the cooler breeze of evening. Loud as it is,
you cannot locate it. At one moment you think it is up aloft amongst
the rafters, at another moment it seems to be close by. It emanates
from an uninteresting-looking brown insect, about an inch long, who
makes prodigious jumps like a grasshopper.