United States or Guam ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Owing to the fact that I was working for my living on a ranch at Cherry Creek, I had no chance of fishing on week-days, but on Sundays, after breakfast, I used to take my primitive willow rod from the roof, where it had been for six days, see that the ten or twelve feet of string was as sound at least as my frayed yard of gut, examine my hook, and then start hunting grasshoppers.
The twenty-fifth of July, 1874, is a memorable day in the life of John Barclay. For on that day the grasshoppers which had eaten off the twenty thousand acres of wheat in the fields of the Golden Belt Wheat Company, as though it had been cropped, rose and left the Missouri Valley.
I have slumbered curled in a coil of rope on the deck of a cattle-boat, in an ambulance wagon, on a stretcher, in farmhouse barns and under hedges and haystacks. I have slept in the sand by the blue Mediterranean Sea, with the crickets and grasshoppers "zipping" and "zinging" all night long. But our dug-out nights on the edge of the bay at Buccaneer Bivouac were the most enjoyable.
God heard our petitions, and in three days the grasshoppers were gone. Then some of the unsaved people said, "Oh, well, the grasshoppers would have gone anyway. They just stayed until their wings were grown: they would have gone without prayer." Thus they dishonored God.
I know a moth suffers most over any injury to them; but one takes flight no quicker or more precipitately at a touch on the antennae than on the head, wing, leg, or abdomen. We are safe in laying down a law that antennae are homologous organs and used for identical purposes on all forms of life carrying them. The short antennae of grasshoppers appear to be organs of scent.
Not only the brown and yellow butterflies gliding hither and thither, lighting now and then upon some pretty blossom, only to soar away again high above his head as they discovered him approaching, attracted his attention; but their cousins, the little black crickets and the green and brown grasshoppers, springing about him in the meadowlands, made him shout aloud with delight.
When Forel emptied a bagful of ants in a meadow, he saw that "the crickets ran away, abandoning their holes to be sacked by the ants; the grasshoppers and the crickets fled in all directions; the spiders and the beetles abandoned their prey in order not to become prey themselves; "even the nests of the wasps were taken by the ants, after a battle during which many ants perished for the safety of the commonwealth.
"You're the best girl in the world and I'm going to marry you when I get rich enough to come back and build you a house to be in, I'm going out where the cattle are thick as grasshoppers, and I'm going to be a cattle king and then you can be a cattle queen and ride around with me on our ranch, that's what they call a farm out there. Now, you're my girl and you must wait for me to come back.
Presently it seemed as if the whole air was filled with light silvery clouds, and what looked at first like flakes of snow falling, which we saw as they approached nearer to be numberless large insects with wings. They were, indeed, grasshoppers, as they are called in the North-West Territory, though they are really locusts.
As I was sauntering along a road, a peculiar croaking little trill greeted me from the hedge, sounding very much like the rasping call of certain kinds of grasshoppers when they are suddenly startled and take to wing. But no insect had ever emitted quite such a sound in my hearing. This could not be an insect. It was worth while to look and make sure of the identity of the odd musician.
Word Of The Day