So then runs the negro’s song; and unless all is illusion and delusion, as the Berkleyans hold, the “whitemans,” as I can vouch from actual experience, are equally entitled to have their misfortunes as pathetically recorded. I believe, however, it would be as difficult to say anything entirely original about musquitoes as to discover a new pleasure, or the long sought desideratum of perpetual motion; nevertheless, my subject being India, it would not be _en régle_ to pass them over altogether in silence; suffice it therefore to say, the first nights of my stay at Mr. Hearty’s I was by a cruel oversight put into a bed without the usual appendage—a set of gauze curtains. The door of my apartment, which was on the ground floor, opened on the garden, and a well, a pool, and a dense mass of foliage, formed a splendid musquito-preserve, within a few yards of it. A couple of oil-lights, in wall-shades, burnt in the room; the doors were open, the night close and oppressive. It was truly “the genial hour for burning,” though not exactly in Moore’s sense of the passage; and then such a concerto!—“Quack! quack! quack!” said the _mezzo-soprano_ voices of the little frogs—“croak! croak! croak!” responded in deep bass the huge Lablaches of the pool—“click! click!” went the lizards—“ghur! ghur!” the musk-rat, as he ricketed round the room, emitting his offensive odour; whilst Countless fire-flies, gems of light, Bright jewels of the tropic night, spangled the trees in all directions. The idea of Aladdin’s garden, to which his _soi-disant_ uncle introduced him, was presenting itself to my mind, when the nip of a musquito recalled me from the fanciful to the consideration of painful realities. The sultry heat of an Indian night in the rains is sometimes terrific: not a breath moving; but, to make up for it, a universal stir of reptile and insect life, with a croak, hum, hiss, and buzz, perfectly astounding. What a prize for the musquitoes was I—a fine, fresh, ruddy griffin, full of wholesome blood, the result of sea-breezes and healthy chylification! and, in good sooth, they did fall foul of me with the appetite of gluttons. Sleep! bless your dear, simple heart, the thing was about as possible as for St. Lawrence to have reposed on his gridiron. I tingled from top to toe with an exquisite tingling. In vain I scratched—in vain I tossed—in vain I rolled myself up like a corpse in a winding-sheet. Nought would do; so out I jumped, half phrenzied, and dipping my hand in the oil glasses of the lamps, I rubbed their unctuous contents over my body, to deaden the intolerable itching—an effect which in some degree it produced. Thus I spent the long hours of the sultry night; towards morning, the musquitoes being gorged, tortured into insensibility, and nature fairly worn out, I procured a little rest.