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Show Life Wu Only a Dreary Waste When th Grasshoppers Came. It was well on in August, and the drought had done its worst to the corn. It was a hot, sultry day, as parched and dry as all the days befora The sky was dear but for tho usual haze that never left it, the haze of wearing heat. About noon my father came up from the field and summoned us to see something that looked like Bnow. The air about the sun seemed filled with snowflakes, thick, innumerable, and flitting rapidly, as snowflakes da But snowflakes and the clear atmosphere and the hot day wera quite incompatible things. They could not be snowflakes, but what else could they be? We racked our brains in vain to imagine. Perhaps it was some kind of a cyclone whi:h had lifted leaves and dust and other such things into the air. But there was no signs of that, and every ev-ery one of the snowflakes was of regular regu-lar size, with no such irregularity as sticks and branches and leaves carried into the air would present We ate dinner in puzzled uncertainty as to what was hanging over us. But two hours later it was painfully apparent appar-ent what the snowflakes in the sun really real-ly wera They were full grown grasshoppers. grass-hoppers. By 4 o'clock the air was cleat and serene, and the grasshoppers were with ua They were not a few thousand Insects, miserable little pests, flitting about in the air and getting into your face when you were out of doors. They were millions upon millions. The trees became brown with them. They covered cover-ed the corn as some insects will literally literal-ly hide from view a leaf sometimea They were hungry, too, and began to eat leaves, cornstalks, the bark of trees, anything and everything was needed to fill this ravenous army that had fallen upon us from heaven. One went out of doors and stepped on soores at each 6tride. They crawled up your trousers legs and under women's skirts. They made holes in tho cloth fly netting and came into the house. They plumped hard into your face with a little whacking whack-ing sting wherever you went or did nol go. Everything seemed alive with them. I was young then and was filled simply sim-ply with a curious wonder. But as I think of it now I am sure my father must have been quite overpowered with discouragement when he saw what the grasshoppers really meant. He saw on the first day that they had alighted to get a square meal and certainly meant to have it - But day after day they Un |