IF the Bruce loved his instructive spider, for which history does not vouch, why should not the public mosquito be dear to desponding minds, as a yet more victorious exponent of the value of perseverance and a set purpose? Who hath circumvented her? She laughs at all dissuasion. She evades the soldier's gun, the physician's potion; the Sophi with his fleet cannot drive her away, nor the Czar impale her in any dungeon. What the mosquito came hitherward to do, that she does. The "moral runs at large."

It is all very well to abuse her; one gets a poor, childish satisfaction out of such terms of endearment as can be readily bestowed: unfledged Tamerlane! disturber of the sanctities of night! Satan of summer joys!—and so on. What avails all that? We have to bow our necks, and endure her diabolics. She is an evil which the Constitution cannot remedy; and as we are given to understand that she does not speak English, no protest formulated in that tongue can pierce her horny and tyrannical heart.

The believing soul may picture her primarily in some sweet, decorous frolic through the glades of Eden (for charity would even accord to her the possibility of a state of first innocence), frisking airily with birds-of-Paradise, and given wholly to honorable practices. Ah! but what man is proof against violent thoughts of Father Noah, who, when she had already entered on her vein-glorious, flesh-loving, back-biting, and peace-disturbing career, gave her the shelter of his house through troublous days, and, like the short-sighted philanthropist that he was, cursed the four continents in befriending two obstreperous insects?

I cannot consider any cosmic force more eminently practical. The poet lauds a river-bank, and sheds on a grove the starry fascinations of rhetoric; it is none other than Mosquito who induces you to hate and shun what you would fain be persuaded to consider fair. She it is who can make the greenest landscape odious, and the calm haunts of trees vociferous as if all Bedlam were let loose under their outspread arms. She is your best circumnavigator. I cannot picture to my wildest speculations a place where she is not. Nowhere is she an exile, but hath her native bog all over Christendom. She holds her cannibalistic orgies wherever human foot hath trodden. In that Land which, geographically, is No Man's, methinks she prowleth still, looking for him. Howsoever arrant a folly it be to ignore so great an influence on our personal behavior, so huge a factor in the reckoning of men's woes, little enough is recorded of this wretched anthropophaginian. Dante did weakly, inasmuch as she figured not as chief tormentor among his perpetually condemned. The cricket, the glow-worm, the ant, the mole, long since found their bards, but no prophetic malediction has fallen from Parnassus on their evil-minded cousin. There must needs be a greater than Milton to pronounce her anathema.

The immense malignity of her disposition is, with superlative cunning, cloaked under her bodily slenderness and aerial grace. What monstrous discrepancy betwixt her and her doings! By what unheard-of perverseness in the natural order is she framed delicately as a kind sunbeam, or a fragment of sea-foam? On the theory of physical degeneracy, we may consider her in the archetypal plan to have been a grim enormity, like Regulus's Bagrada serpent, a candidate of yore for the attentions of some Jack-the-Giant-Killer, who, should he arise to-day, might prove but a clumsy blunderer in face of her impish agilities.

Helpless victim that I am, I look at Mosquito with unmixed awe. I harbor grotesque superstitions, and build up romances in her name. Why not metempsychosis? This marvellous restlessness,—might it not once have been a human thing? What if some world-scourge, like Attila, were pent in these narrow bounds, and sent whirring through space again, on the old, colossal mission of annoyance? Involuntarily I scan Mosquito with no humbler glass than a telescope. Even to the dignity of a malignant planet hath she attained in mine unjaundiced eye. Straightway, as fear building on fear, mount my fancies, memories, speculations, till on their topmost pinnacle flashes the saying of the liberal philosophers, that the immortal principle may not be lacking in the "meanest thing that feels;" and my sole, honest, overwhelming impulse is to forswear the pious Sunday-school hope of becoming an angel, that is, a winged creature, lest in any phase of untried being, Mosquito! I should bear affinity to that which thou art.

Is it not an apostrophe to thee? What fiend was it yesterday moved my shuddering lips to quote that gentlest strophe over thy flattened corpusculum, meant, peradventure, for a kindlier spirit?—

Such is the irony of revenge.

Dread Reminiscence! appalling Probability! disconcerting and inescapable Fact! thou art the Inscrutable, the Unattainable, the Never-Reached, I take it, of the metaphysical circle. In deference to thee, I salute the hem of a mosquito-net.

In the watches of the night, my soul shall rejoice to behold thy wrathful eye outside.

footer

header