The Arizona sentinel., 1888-10-20
A TERRIBLE INSECT.
The Fierce Culex, or Mosquito, of thu
 British Northwest.


 Never shall 1 forget my desperate battles with it! But the first encounter is the one the most indelibly marked on my memory, and on my body; and even now, after many years, is one of the sal ent points in a by no means monotonous life.
 Another youth and myself had camped on little water prairie by the Shuswap Lake. Before turning in for the night we made up mosquito fire" and after creeping within our respective nets we lit our pipes, know ing what safety there was in smoke.
 The freshly-heaped on logs blazed brightly, fiery-red in the center, with brilliant tongues of blue and purple flame and thousands of glowing sparks shooting high into the air, while clouds of smoke curled lazily upward in tinted wreaths of gray, till lost in the gather ing darkness. But the fire sank and we got drowsy; and as I knocked out the ashes of my last pipe and coiled cozily to sleep I heard what sounded like the drone of bagpipes approaching over the distant horizon. It was the culex, and the young flying scout inn mediately scrambled through my mOsquito-bar.
 Softly it piped its wee war song like Lilliputian lullaby, while taking an oDna i1ipr oonCtit,,tiopo1 orO,,nd ifo prey. Not a glimpse of it could I catch, although the exasperating sing song seemed sometimes close to my eye-balls. It came and went, rising and falling, now at one ear, now at the other; round behind my head, and then down at my feet. At last it sud- denly ceased. Lightly as a shadow the 'bag-piper" had settled on my ear, and as I felt its bite I cautiously prepared to ''bag" the piper"
 The moment for vengeance had ar rived! Had it? It was a stunning blow, and fancy 1 have been slightly deaf in that ear ever since; but the agile insect skipped away unhurt and resumed its war-song triumphantly.
 Then another of the advanced guard arrived, and then a squadron or two, and then the whole army charged pell-mell.
 The net, as a Northwest mosquito ''bar," was a failure, evidently made for less gymnastic and more amiable mosquitoes. Chats skinned in with out touching the meshes, and the lead ing culex battalions just closed their wings and folded up their legs and were hoisted through by the hosts be- hind. In they shot, with a cheerful hum, by brigades, while the symphony of the ''bagpipes" outside grew still more savage. Then skunk arrived on the scene of action. Not that the little beast could be seen. But the im- mediate atmospheric shock was cir cumstantial evidence sufficiently strong for any body.
 What words can describe the tortures l endured during that sultry summers night-the tossing and the tumbling and the rolling to and fro, the tearing and scratching? We made smoky fires of resinOus spruce, and were almost stiied. We smoked so much tobacco that we felt ill. We scrubbed our- selves with brushes and tore ourselves with our nails, and only made matters worse. Then we held a council of war and decided to try and keep cool. But to treat those myriads of demons with calmness, under the circumstances, would have taxed the philosophy of an Archbishop.
 Next morning when looked in the back of my watch-our only looking glass"-I started back in amazement, wondering what manner of man had become. Even my oldest creditor would never have recognized those frightful features and the wife of my bosom would have repudiated me as a frightful imposter. My watch-case re- flected a countenence like flaming full morn overrun with volcanoes. Was the Pythagorean doctrine true? And had my soul escaped from a body into some body else's? Was 1 now the man in the moonP Was I mad or inebriated with nicotine, and did I see double? Double!
 Why, there were four cheeks on the left side and three on the right, two and half upper lips, five eyelids and hardly any eyes, nose and three quarters, aud ears all around the back of my headi At all events, that was how 1 appeared in the back of my watch-a most awful refectioni My lips kept getting into my mouth, and my eyelids into the residue of my eyes, while my dissipated nose seemed to fall all over my face. My skin felt red hot and as tight as a roasting apples when about to burst and there was no doctor within a hundred miles. My ears put brushing out of the question, and my knobby head was swollen many sizes too big for my hat -4AU the Year Round
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