Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 20, 2025
"He pointed out that the symptoms of one dying beneath the spell of an Obeah man are closely paralleled in the cases of men and animals who have suffered from nocturnal attacks of blood-sucking bats." I laid the open book down upon the bed. My brain was in a tumult.
This strikes me as a way of putting it which would appeal most forcibly to a boy; and if, in addition, we were to point out to him that, like all shady things, it has a tendency to grow and sharpen the man into a sharper and develop the blood-sucking apparatus of a leech, besides bringing wretchedness and misery on others, he might be led to resist the first beginnings of a betting habit which may lead on to gambling in after years.
There was something rite-like in these movements of the doomed soldier. And there was a resemblance in him to a devotee of a mad religion, blood-sucking, muscle-wrenching, bone-crushing. They were awed and afraid. They hung back lest he have at command a dreadful weapon. At last, they saw him stop and stand motionless.
But he, for all his hideousness and unseemly mien, is not the vampire; the blood-sucking bat has won a mantle of deceit from the hands of Nature a garb that gives him a modest and not unpleasing appearance, and makes it a difficult matter to distinguish him from his guileless confrères of our summer evenings.
Waterton, whom all the world recognizes as a gentleman, and consequently a man of truth, laboured at one time under the same stigma of exaggeration as Captain Stedman, and many other illustrious travellers; and he confirms the blood-sucking in the following terms: "Some years ago, I went to the river Paumarau, with a Scotch gentleman.
Suddenly he almost stumbled over a hideous sight. A low whistle brought his followers closing in upon him. The skeleton of a full-grown man lay outstretched in the grass. The bones were fresh bloodstained and bright and a swarm of blood-sucking insects arose from them.
Vast territories of thickly populated, fertile country near the shores of lakes and rivers are now depopulated as a result of the death-dealing bite of these flies, more deadly than the blood-sucking, vampirish ghosts with which, in the middle ages, people supposed night air to be inhabited. For this fly carries with it germs which it leaves in the blood of its victims, which I shall show next."
It is certain that insects and blood-sucking bats determine the existence of the larger naturalised quadrupeds in several parts of South America. We see in many cases in the more recent tertiary formations that rarity precedes extinction; and we know that this has been the progress of events with those animals which have been exterminated, either locally or wholly, through man's agency.
But the dragon-fly is very ancient on the earth, and if, during the Devonian epoch, when it existed, it preyed on some blood-sucking insect from which or Culicidae have come, then these stupid little insects have certainly had ample time in which to learn well at least one lesson.
But Mary could never remember when the need of money to pay the mortgage had not invaded the gentle routine of their home-life, robbing the sangaree of its delicate flavor in the long, sleepy summer afternoons, invading the very dining-room, an unwelcome guest at the old mahogany table, prompting Aunt Adelaide to cast anxious glances at the worn silver—would it go to pay that blood-sucking mortgage next?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking