me in the dark, where he knew I was helpless. It was so contemptible, I determined not to mind it; but there was no magnanimity in my adversary, and silent contempt had no effect upon his bitter hatred. All of a sudden, a sharp, hot pain, like a bolt from an elf's diminutive bow, pierced me to the quick. I jumped up, I struck out, I fought with desperation. Woe's me! Who can contend with an invisible foe? Besides, he found allies; like a pack of fierce dogs they fell upon me, here, there, everywhere; the little guerillas laughed at my efforts, they despised my awkward blows, escaping with marvellous agility; and when morning broke, my only trophy from the disastrous battle, in which I had been ingloriously beaten, was the lifeless body of one of my adversaries. When the housekeeper came in with her cup of chocolate, dressed in more brilliant colors than the night before, I pointed at it with silent reproach. The heartless woman laughed, and cried out: "Che volete, signore, a little gentleman in black!"

It was then I began to ask myself, who in the world this tiny being was that thus fearlessly declared war against man, the pigmy against the giant-this irresistible enemy, against whom no constitution is safe, no stoicism a sufficient protection, who defies the most powerful perfumes and laughs at all defensive armor, which leaves but the smallest crevice by which he may enter. I found that his diminutive size, his dark color, and his extreme skill in withdrawing from the sight of man, had led to his being looked upon with grave distrust. Things imperfectly beheld always cause uneasiness, like objects seen in the dark. He is so very small, moreover, that we fancy we are hardly bound to treat him with justice. So a German poet thought he sealed the poor little gentleman's fate by simply saying, "God made the world, but the devil made the flea." Another savant, more generous in his admiration of the marvellous manner in which he was made, declared that he was a miracle, both by his make and the mystery of his purposes on carth, and a being

"That in his wondrous power never can

Be made by angel, devil, or earthly man." Did not even the son of Sophroniscus consider it a task, worthy of the noblest among us, to reflect on the ways of the mysterious creature, and to measure the length of his footsteps?

The fact is, that the poor little animal, called upon by his Maker to secure man against suffering from a plethora of blood, has to do his duty upon earth under the weight of fearful reproaches and constant danger of life. Dr. Sangrado, who opens our veins and reduces our strength, so that months do not suffice to restore us to our former condition, receives large fees and earns a high reputation; but Nature's tiny physician, who goes to work tenderly and scarcely punctures our skin, is persecuted with implacable hatred. He shares this feeling with the whole world of insects— one of those pariah-classes in the animated kingdom which have to wait for a Republican party and an Abraham Lincoln to be rescued from ignominy and to be intrusted with equality of rights. In the meantime they are looked upon with terror and an unconcealed repugnance. In this we are all like children, who recoil with perhaps instinctive apprehension from the most beautiful of insects; and even the philosopher, notwithstanding his attempts at universal sympathy, is subject to the same impressions. The feeling is increased, when the tiny unknown being is found to be furnished with an arsenal of extraordinary weapons, which are quickly interpreted into a standing menace to man. At first blush we may confess to a little tremor, as we look upon the formidable, ever-handy armory, which some of them--and the little gentleman in black among them— carry with them, like champions of old going forth to tournament and war. There are pincers and nippers, saws, spits and hooks, augers, and notched teeth, daggers and long knives; but, after all, they are nothing more than the tools with which they perform their daily labors; and we owe them some sympathy, even, for having to carry

them all, and always with them, just as if the mechanic next door to us should never go out without bristling with all the steel and brass and wood which he uses in his craft. A monstrously strange sight he would be to us, and very apt to frighten children and philosophers; and yet, this is all that looks so very terrible in the poor insect.

The prejudice, however, is almost universal. Insects are repugnant to us; they annoy us, and sometimes-let us confess it-they frighten us; but they invariably do so in proportion to our ignorance. We always regard the unknown with a suspicious eye. The only question asked is, almost invariably, "How can we kill them?" We are glad, therefore, when we meet with that enlightened justice which teaches pity for the insect. The French painter, Gros, saw one of his pupils, a handsome, thoughtless young fellow, enter his studio with a superb butterfly, just caught, and still spasmodically flapping its wings, pinned to his hat. The artist was indignant, and angrily exclaimed: "Is that the feeling with which you regard beautiful things? You find a charming creature enjoying itself in the sunshine, and you can think of no other use for it than to crucify it and to kill it barbarously! Leave the house, and never return; never show yourself in my presence again !"

In the case of our little friend, it must be admitted that he has no beauty to claim as an offset for his fierce enmity to man, and that his sharp-pointed dagger is not a peaceful tool by which he earns his livelihood, but a surgical instrument with. which he draws our blood. Hence the hostility is mutual, and Nature has been compelled to endow him with a strength and an agility little less than miraculous, in order to protect him against the overwhelming odds with which man meets him in daily battle. For that wise being, so high above all creation, cannot remember that, though the bite of bloodsuckers is at certain seasons and in certain climates an almost intolerable annoyance, yet some good end is answered by it,

and the torment he experiences is compensated in a way that he is not aware of, or Providence would not, like a wise physician, have prescribed the operation and furnished the chirurgical operators with the necessary and most curious knives and lancets. The same ignorance looked for ages with horror upon certain flies, which laid their eggs in some plants, and caused them to form comfortable homes for their offspring. Like a magician's wand, their egg-placer would call forth, by a slight puncture, a wonderful and monstrous excrescence, sometimes a mossy bed, as in roses, at other times a kind of beautiful apple or a transparent berry, as in the oak-tree. We have learned since to admire the apparent deformity as a marvellous provision of Nature for their tiny eggs, and, more recently still, as of the highest utility for men, since to some of these, like the Aleppo oak-gall, learning, commerce, the arts, and every one of us who has a friend at a distance, are most deeply indebted. There can be no doubt, that creatures thus privileged have their work laid out for them-an important mission, which renders them indispensable, and which makes them an essential element in the harmony of the world. Michelet says very truly: "Suns are necessary, and so are gnats. Order is great in the Milky Way, but not less so in the hive." So it is here: huge lions, man-eaters, are necessary in African deserts; little gentlemen in black suffice for their work in civilized countries.

Well might we, moreover, pardon the little gentleman in black for some of the troubles he causes us, on account of the ingenuous trustfulness with which he comes to us, driven by a natural instinct.

He knows full well whom he loves; for he has cousins of lower taste, who go to the dog, the cat, or the bird; but they never stay with man, if by chance too bold a leap has carried them to forbidden regions: he alone is entitled to associate with the highest on earth. We praise our dogs and pet our cats; but what is their intimacy with us wher

compared with that of our nearest friend, who lives not only with us, but upon us, in every sense of the word? There is a touching story told of the appreciation he sometimes, though but too rarely, meets with, in the interesting travels of Kohl. He came to a modest inn by the wayside, in Bulgaria, and, before entering, ventured to inquire of the hostess if there were any fleas inside. "Fleas ?" she replied, with amazement, and a happy consciousness of being well provided with that article, at least; "who could live without fleas?" She was right, and uttered a great truth. The flea is a supplement of man, "his next friend," in the legal sense of the word, and his familiar spirit.

Perhaps this was the reason why he was made so small, that his diminutive size is constantly used as an illustration. When the hosts of Xerxes came across the waters to crush little Greece, the Greek poet endeavored to cheer up his discouraged countrymen by comparing those myriads of strange men to contemptible "clouds of fleas ;" and when the son of Jesse stood on the high rock opposite his mighty adversary, who, from his shoulder and upward, was higher than any of the people, he called out, in great self-humiliation: "After whom is the king of Israel come out? After a dead dog, after a flea?" His extremely sober and even sombre garb deprives him of all power of charming, and although most of us remember the day when " puce "-colored silks were all the fashion, French was hardly familiar enough to our mothers to reveal to them the true meaning of the innocent-looking word. The poor little gentleman has no splendor of colors to display before our eyes, like the glistening beetles, radiant in the rays of the sun and worshipped by the Egyptians, or the fluttering moths, of whose countless families Hood pretended to know only two more intimately, the Mammoth and the Behemoth. No ancient god endowed him with the soft notes of the cicada, which the Athenian women wore in their hair as the emVOL. II.-23

blem of their native land, nor even with the home-like chirping of the cricket on our hearth. The Italian proverb, it is true, speaks of men of such exquisite astuteness, that they hear the flea's cough; but it requires, in all probability, a Machiavellian training to acquire such cunning. He has no wings, shining in all the bright colors of the rainbow, to attract our eye, like the beautiful dragon-fly, with its heart full of cruelty and bloody murder. A perfect vagabond, wandering, like the Arab, from oasis to oasis, he has never learned any of those marvellous trades by which other relations of his charm our minds and excite our admiration. He spins no gossamer texture, like his spinstercousin, the spider; he builds no richlyfilled garners, like the busy bee, and has no well-ordered household, like the ant; but a roving Ishmael, he is a wild man, his hand against every man and every man's hand against him.

Nevertheless, he is a poetical character perhaps, because he is such a wanderer upon the earth, and not bound by the laws of domestic life. He is full of character, and the very opposite of that idle, voracious cousin of his, whom the ancients punned about when they spoke of culex and pulex, whom the giants of the occans, the whales, even tolerate, and of whose repulsive physiognomy Lavater said, with a depth of conviction and an emphasis of expression worthy of a better face: "The creature has a corrupt soul; it is unfit to love or to be loved." And yet even that creature has found immortality at the hands of the great master, whose brush painted the goddess of beauty in the Uffizi at Florence, as she busies her rosy hands in the ambrosial locks of Eros. Fortunately, our hero has not escaped the attention of poets of every age and every nation, from the great singer of the Greeks to the last humorist among the French. In the Middle Ages, especially, he furnished the subject for a whole series of grave writings, from the epic poem, in which the perseverance of woman in chasing him to the bitter end is praised with eloquence, to

the grave juridical dissertation in Latin on "What is Justice to Fleas ?" and solemnly dedicated to a certain Priscilla, virgini carissimæ. Nor did the Scribes and Pharisees neglect the tempting occasion to practise their subtlety and exquisite sophistry on the unlucky animal, and long treatises were written to determine how many of them might be killed on a Sabbath, without breaking the commandment; whether it was sinful to resist their attacks during prayer, and how far the priest might be justified in refusing admittance to a worshipper who presented himself in a robe defiled by their blood.

If the little gentleman has neither beauty of form nor brilliancy of color to recommend him, nobody at least can deny that he is as fearfully and wonderfully made as man himself. There is no more warlike being to be found among the hundred thousands of the class in which naturalists place him: he prefers six legs to our two, and wears plate-armor to protect himself in his incessant warfare; for the whole body is encased in beautiful, dark-brown steel; from the tiny joints start stiff hairs to repel all invasion, and the plump, well-fed body at once suggests his superiority over the tightly-laced, skeleton-shaped figures of distant cousins. Look at him in the solar microscope, where he is a welcome visitor, and always receives, upon his first appearance, an Ah! of delight from one sex, mixed with a concert of low, merry exclamations from the other. How fierce he looks in his knightly armament! How powerful those two armlike extremities appear, which have only two joints, and move upon flexible pivots in the very cheeks of the strange being! And then those superb hindlegs, of such length and marvellous strength, that they enable him to walk with more than seven-league boots, and to leap far beyond the most agile of Turners. Have we not been told, by one of those amiable statisticians who never rest till they have reduced every statement to numbers, that the Londoner who could leap from the Strand at

one bound to the top of St. Paul's, would still be second to the young flea who makes his first experiment in jumping?

There is much to be read in his face, even though we do not believe in Lavater nor read the Phrenological Journal. An old naturalist established the principle, that the weaker and smaller the animal, the more astute and malicious his features. The face of the little gentleman is small and wrinkled; he looks. careworn, as one may well appear who lives, like David, in constant fear of his life, and gets his daily pittance but by stealth and with imminent danger. The eyes, especially, when duly magnified, present an irresistibly ludicrous mixture of reckless wildness with astute cunning, and, were they visible to human sight unaided, would be of endless interest to careful observers.

Nature can hardly be expected to produce such marvellous strength of body and such a decided character all at once; she has to pass him at least through three different stages before she sends him forth, one of the most perfect of her countless creations. He appears first as a pure white egg, all beauty and innocence, though so small that the eye cannot see it; then he assumes the modest form of a sly but harmless maggot, which after a while cunningly wraps itself in its own silken winding-sheet, and dies, to all appearance; but lo! before the moon is full again, the magic slumber is broken, death is changed into life, and as the sombre envelop bursts and breaks asunder, the young gentleman, in his glossy garments, leaps forth, armed cap-à-pie, to live and to love as all his wild forefathers have done before him. But he no sooner enters the world, poor little fellow! than he finds it full of strife and struggle, and rare must be his good fortune if he reaches the good old age of six years, and sees grandchildren and great-grandchildren leap and carol around him in the recklessness of his race. Few but fall into the hands of man, generally to be unscrupulously murdered, but at times to be held in sad captivity; for these

devoted friends of his must occasionally serve to amuse him in their chains, and he revenges himself on a few, whom he treats with the most refined cruelty, for the wrong-doings of a whole race. Only those who love him in preference to beast or bird are strong and lively enough to stand the severe training; but their strength is remarkable, and it is said that if you fasten a human flea to the end of an unbroken wheat-straw, he will be powerful enough to lift it right off the table on which it is placed! The best for public performances are the strongest; they come from Russia, and are sent abroad in pill-boxes, packed in the finest cotton, and with a clear and prominent caution on the top, so as to keep custom-house officers from prying too curiously into the contents of the little parcels. Smaller supplies reach the trainer in the corner of an envelop, packed in tissue-pap.r, and carefully glued to the left hand, so as to protect them against the blow of the stampmarker, which would otherwise make a speedy end to the whole colony. The little gentlemen in black have actually their market-price, which varies with the season. In the abundance of the summer-months they sell for a few farthings; in winter they rise to a cent a-piece; and a ludicrous story is current of a trainer who, upon unpacking his diminutive performers, found that one had slipped his chains and escaped. Time pressed, and the vacancy had to be filled, or the team of four blacks before the gilt glass coach would not be complete. No one near would acknowledge to own the desired commodity, until an obliging stable-boy was found, who offered to supply the needful animal; but he demanded sixpence for it, and sixpence he got.

Fancy, if you can, the little gentleman used to roam freely through the wide world, and to taste now of the vigor of a young man, and now of the nectar of a fair beauty, suddenly caught and chained! Yes, chained; for as man has discovered the aptness of the horse's mouth to hold the bit, by which he controls the noble animal, so he has

found out that the tiny slave, whom he wishes to make useful, has a groove between the neck and the body suitable for his purposes; holding the poor captive by a pair of forceps, he deftly slips a noose of finest floss-silk over his head, passes it round his neck, and ties it with a peculiar knot. The slave is chained! for the silk cannot slip up or down, nor can it be pushed off with the legs; at the same time the refined cruelty of man leaves him at full liberty to use his kangaroo-like springing legs, and keeps him in perfect health, to make him perform well. He is fed well -on the arm of his master; for the little gentleman is dainty, and nothing but the vigorous blood of a healthy man will keep him in good order. Here they have their revenge, in their turn, for it is found that the fastidious creatures will not take supper or breakfast, the only two meals in which they indulge, unless the hand or the arm is perfectly motionless. Moreover, they are regular gourmands, and, with a taste utterly inconceivable to us, they insist upon taking ample time for their meals. How they must chuckle, the little, whimsical beings, when they thus bite and suck to their hearts' delight, while their cruel master has to stand motionless by the hour, fearful lest he should interrupt them in their enjoyment, and find them unable, next day, to perform their task! Still, they do not live long in captivity. A patriarch was owned by a famous Italian trainer, well known in this country a few years ago, who had pulled up a bucket from a miniature well for eighteen months. He died apparently from pure old age, being found, one day, dead at his post, with his bucket drawn half-way up the well.

In his freedom he enjoys life as few of his kindred are able to do. A gentle pressure on his steel shanks, and he rises like a rocket, or he leaps sideways from friend to friend. Little heart, bold heart! says Pliny, and the little gentleman in black is no respecter of persons. He finds his victim at the writing-table or in the whirl of the dance; he enters