“What do you wonder?” Wampus asked. “I was just wondering if you could charm a worm by playing it a tune on a flute, the way people charm snakes,” Jibby said. “If we could, we might get a flute and charm some worms until they crawled out of their holes, no matter how deep the dry weather has sent them. But I never heard of charming worms with a flute.” We laughed, but Jibby Jones was entirely serious. If he had ever heard, or read, of worms being charmed, he would have tried it because that was the way he was. But he hadn’t. “No,” he said, “I don’t believe it would work. If it would work, Izaak Walton would have written it in his fishing book. I’ll have to think of some other way.” “No, don’t you bother,” Tad said. “We’ll get the worms.” So then we all said the same thing, because we knew how Jibby swelled up when mosquitoes bit him. Some folks do and some folks don’t, but Jibby does. And Mosquito Hollow is just about the worst mosquito place in the world. The skeets are bad enough anywhere on Birch Island, because there are billions of them that come over from the ponds and sloughs, but in Mosquito Hollow it is as if all the mosquitoes in the world had gathered together in one place. A hundred skeets will get on your hand in a second and all start to bite at once. Mosquito Hollow is the lowest ground on Birch Island and the dampest, and that is why there are always worms there, but it is why there are always skeets there, too. It is down near the end of the island, below all the real cottages. There is one old shack there, about as big as a playhouse, but nobody has lived in it for years--too many skeets, I guess. All around the hollow, and in it, the nettles grow as high as a man’s head and keep out the breeze, and the skeets just make it the metropolis of the whole skeet world. There are not so many in early spring, but by summer there are trillions of quadrillions, and the noise they make sounds like a sawmill. “Don’t you bother, Jibby,” I said. “We’ll get worms for all of us.” So Jibby went with us down the path along the river, but, when we got down near the old shack, he sat down on an elm root to think how to get worms without getting mosquito-bit, and the rest of us went back in through the nettles to get the worms. It was only a few yards, but the minute we got to the low ground the skeets were at us. All of us began slapping our necks and faces and hands and arms and whacking at our backs and ankles and legs, and jumping around and waving our arms.