"If ever you pass through La Brenne, you will see a man, pale and straight-haired, with a woollen cap on his head, and his legs and arms naked; he walks along the borders of a marsh, among the spots left dry by the surrounding waters. This man is a leech-fisher. To see him from a distance,--his wobegone aspect, his hollow eyes, his livid lips, his singular gestures, you would take him for a maniac. If you observe him every now and then raising his legs and examining them one after another, you might suppose him a fool; but he is an intelligent leech-fisher. The leeches attach themselves to his legs and feet as he moves among their haunts; he feels their bite, and gathers them as they cluster about the roots of the bulrushes and aquatic weeds, or beneath the stones covered with a green and slimy moss. He may thus collect ten or twelve dozen in three or four hours. In summer, when the leeches retire into deep water, the fishers move about upon rafts made of twigs and rushes. One of these traders was known to collect, with the aid of his children, seventeen thousand five hundred leeches in the course of a few months; these he had deposited in a reservoir, where, in night, they were all frozen _en masse_." But congelation does not kill them, and they can easily be thawed into life, by melting the ice that surrounds them. Leeches, it appears, can bear much rougher usage than one might imagine: they are packed up closely in wet bags, carried on pack-saddles, and it is well known that they will attach themselves with more avidity when rubbed in a dry napkin previous to their application. Leech-gatherers are in general short-lived, and become early victims to agues, and other diseases brought on by the damp and noxious air that constantly surrounds them; the effects of which they seek to counteract by the use of strong liquors. Leeches kept in a glass bottle may serve as a barometer, as they invariably ascend or descend in the water as the weather changes from dry to wet, and they generally rise to the surface prior to a thunder-storm. They are most voracious, and are frequently observed to destroy one another by suction; the strong ones attaching themselves to the weaker. The quantity of blood drawn by leeches has been a subject of much controversy; but it is pretty nearly ascertained that a healthy leech, when fully gorged, has extracted about half an ounce. When they will not readily fix, Dr. Johnson recommends that they be put into a cup of porter. The cause of a leech falling off when full is not clearly ascertained, but it is supposed to arise from a state of asphyxia brought on by the compression of the breathing vesicles, and the distension of the alimentary tube.