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The colored boy flashes one glance at the horse and rider who are so surely gaining upon him, and his lips close in a grim line. They are half-way down the stretch, and Mosquito's head is at the stallion's neck. For a single moment Patsy thinks of the sick woman at home and what that race will mean to her, and then his knees close against the horse's sides with a firmer dig.
"All these precautions for a wretched fly." "Exactly. A mosquito's gimlet carries more terrors for the explorer than the elephant's trunk, and his hum is more dreaded than the roar of the lion. The mosquito is fever-winged, alert, and bloodthirsty. He carries the germs of malaria with him; and malaria kills off more men than all the reptiles and wild animals combined."
But when Earth dictates that we will now swing south, be it ever so few degrees south, our mosquito is overpowered and can only drag us clear to Earth-center on a closing spiral, which would eventually lead us to crash somewhere in the southern hemisphere, a good many orbits from now. "I hope," he said, "reversing the magnetic field will indeed reverse our little mosquito's thrust."
Apollo might speed among them his silver arrows, which erst heaped the Phrygian shores with hecatombs of Argive slain, and they would but complain of the mosquito's beak.
Very gently he removed hat and overcoat. And then I was sitting peacefully in the Morris chair, in my old cassock, and with my own old biretta on my head; and there was no longer that thin buzzing, shrill and torturing as a mosquito's, singing in my ears.
His ground tackle, long saved up for a bonne bouche, had provided funds for that last night in the gambling hell, where we both got cleared out together; and the balance that was left didn't represent a mosquito's ransom.
It was to some too tempting a subject of fun; for others it had a deeper interest; it could not be suffered to lie still. Wych Hazel's ears could hardly get out of the sound of raillery, in all sorts of forms; from the soft insinuation of mischief in a mosquito's song, to the downright attacks of Kitty Fisher's teeth and Phinny Powder's claws.
Was he one whit weaker or more susceptible than his fellows? I think not. All the philosophy on earth will not teach us to endure without wincing a mosquito's bite. The hardiest hero bears about him one spot where an ivy-leaf clinging intercepted the petrifying water a tiny out-of-the-way spot, not very near the head or heart, but palpable enough to be stricken by Paris's arrow or Hagen's spear.
There is a perspective of sound as well as of sight, and one must have some idea of the size of a noise before one can judge of its distance. A mosquito's horn in a dark room may seem like a trumpet on the battlements; and the tumult of a mighty stream heard through an unknown stretch of woods may appear like the babble of a mountain brook close at hand.
There is not in all organic nature, to my mind, any instance of wasted energy comparable in magnitude with the mosquito's thirst for blood, and the instincts and elaborate blood-pumping apparatus with which it is related.
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