"When I had got fairly down to Commercial Street, I saw that all the people were greatly excited. Some were talking loudly, but most were staring up toward the sun, shading their eyes with their hands. Then I heard old Mr. Beasley say: 'That's surely them all right; doggon, they'll eat us up.' "My heart jumped. Who could be coming from the sun to eat us up? I burst into excited questions. 'Who are coming, Mr. Beasley? I can't see anybody.' "'Hoppers is coming boy; see that sort o' shiny thin cloud up there jest off the edge o' the sun? Well, them's hoppers.' "'But how'll they eat us up, Mr. Beasley? No grasshopper can eat me up.' "'They'll eat us up with their doggoned terbaccy-spittin' mouths; thet's how. And they'll eat _you_ up by eatin' everything you want to eat; thet's how, too. Havin' nothin' to eat is jest about the same as bein' et, accordin' to the way I looks at things.' "It is evident that Mr. Beasley was a philosopher and a pessimist; that is, a man who sees the disagreeable sides of things, who doesn't see the silvery lining to the dark clouds. In fact, in this particular case Mr. Beasley was seeing a very dark lining to that silvery cloud 'jest off the edge o' the sun.' "I stared at the thin shining cloud for a long time, wondering if it were really true that it was grasshoppers. People said the silvery shimmer was made by the reflection of the sunlight from the gauzy wings of the hosts of flying insects. It occurred to me that if the hoppers were just off the edge of the sun, they would all be burned up, or at least have their wings so scorched that they would fall to the ground. However, as the sun is 90,000,000 miles away from the earth, it would take a very long time for the scorched grasshoppers to fall all the way. I guessed that we might have a rain of dead and crippled hoppers about Christmas-time. Anyway there were no grasshoppers now, dead or alive, in the street. And I decided, rather disappointedly, that we probably shouldn't get to see any of the live hoppers at all. Then I asked Mr. Beasley where they came from. "'Rocky Mountains,' he answered, shortly. "This seemed a bit steep, for the nearest of the Rocky Mountains are nearly a thousand miles west of Kansas. And to think of grasshoppers flying a thousand miles! A bit too much, that was. Still I thought I ought to go home and tell the folks. But mother interrupted me in my picturesque tale with a dry request for the meat. Oh, yes. Oh--well, I had forgotten. So the first disagreeable result for me from the grasshopper invasion of Kansas in the summer of 1876 was a painful domestic incident.