black-flies

Updated: June 5, 2025

With many growls and shrugs, he felt obliged to comply; and he performed his part pretty well, the execrations bestowed upon the mosquitoes and black-flies forming a sort of safety-valve to let off the concentrated venom of his temper. When he came in to dinner, he held out his hands to me. "Look at these hands." "They are blistered with the hoe." "Look at my face."

Susanna Moodie - Roughing It in the Bush

"You are terribly disfigured by the black-flies. But Moodie suffers just as much, and says nothing." "Bah! The only consolation one feels for such annoyances is to complain. Oh, the woods! the cursed woods! how I wish I were out of them." The day was very warm, but in the afternoon I was surprised by a visit from an old maiden lady, a friend of mine from C . She had walked up with a Mr.

Susanna Moodie - Life in the Backwoods

The higher the civilization has risen, the more abject is the desolation of barbarism that ensues. The most melancholy spot in the Adirondacks is not a tamarack-swamp, where the traveler wades in moss and mire, and the atmosphere is composed of equal active parts of black-flies, mosquitoes, and midges.

Charles Dudley Warner - In the Wilderness

Grass and green leaves hesitate for an instant and then flash up like tinder. The more you put on, the more your smudge rebels against its proper task of smudging. It makes a pleasant warmth, to encourage the black-flies; and bright light to attract and cheer the mosquitoes. Your effort is a brilliant failure. The proper way to make a smudge is this. Begin with a very little, lowly fire.

Henry Van Dyke - Fisherman's Luck and Some Other Uncertain Things

The mosquitoes continue at their post from dawn to eight or nine o'clock, A.M.; the black-flies succeed, and remain in the field till near sunset; the mosquitoes again mount guard till dark, and are finally succeeded by the gnats, who continue their watch and incessant attacks till near sunrise.

John McLean - Notes of a Twenty-Five Years' Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory: Volume I.

"You are terribly disfigured by the black-flies. But Moodie suffers just as much, and says nothing." "Bah! The only consolation one feels for such annoyances is to complain. Oh, the woods! the cursed woods! how I wish I were out of them." The day was very warm, but in the afternoon I was surprised by a visit from an old maiden lady, a friend of mine from C . She had walked up with a Mr.

Susanna Moodie - Roughing It in the Bush