After I had been a few months in Africa, one day, while in bed with fever, I said to a friend that in allowing my feet to touch the floor beside the bed where natives had been standing, I must have caught the itch; for a most irritating itch had been troubling me for several days. My friend at once suggested jiggers as the cause. I answered with great assurance that it certainly was not jiggers, for I had watched my feet very closely, having determined from the first that I should get no jiggers—which of course was true, but I suppose I had been watching for creatures the size of potato-bugs crawling over my feet I at once called a native boy, however, wishing perhaps to assure my friend, and the boy found seven colonies of jiggers. It took my feet a long time to heal. But it never happened again. The male jigger, as I have said, does not burrow in the flesh, but disports himself upon the surface and makes himself very numerous. He is one of the great variety of influences that keep the white man constantly scratching. The native scratches too, scratches most of the time, and often with both hands, but he does not get excited about it, nor attract so much attention. But the habit is disgusting in the white man, and after all it is a habit rather than a necessity. A minority exercise the strongest self-restraint, a larger number exercise restraint sometimes; many white men, however, exercise no restraint at all, but scratch continually, regardless of the occasion. The sandfly, or _midge_, not known at the coast, but widely distributed in the interior, must be counted among the worst of African pests. They also are exceedingly small. They do their utmost to make life intolerable in the early morning hours after daylight, and again in the evening before dark. Some are more sensitive to them than others. When I was living in the interior, I bathed my hands and face in kerosene or turpentine each morning and evening as their hour approached and sometimes repeated it once or twice before they retired. The mosquitoes are so bad, especially in the low places along the coast, that even the natives must sleep under mosquito nets. In the song of our childhood we were impressed with the possibilities of such minutiæ—as little drops of water, little grains of sand and little moments of time, when these are multiplied by infinity. But infinity is the status of all insect life in Africa. In order to realize the pest of the mosquito in towns adjacent to mangrove swamps one must multiply the insect until it seems to compose about fifty per cent. of the atmosphere. Its music too is impressive. Wherever possible the white man builds his house upon a well-cleared hill and so escapes them, sometimes almost entirely as at Baraka. But this is not always possible. Many missionaries have told of writing letters while sitting cross-legged on their beds with the mosquito-net drawn down around the bed.