Rensselaer Republican, Volume 27, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 November 1894 — WHERE INSECTS THRIVE. [ARTICLE]

WHERE INSECTS THRIVE.

Experience of a Traveler Through the Mountains of Montserrat. New York Suii. One of the first things that struck i me at Montserrat was that nearly I all the plantation houses were sur-l rounded by white sand. When I asked about it I found the reason sufficiently startling. There are serpents in Montserrat, and great spiders as big as a child’s head, and centipedes and scorpions and myriads of small green and brown lizards. It is to keep these creatures away that the sand is brought up from the beach and spread around the houses. Snakes and spiders and other crawling things do not like to make themselves too prominent, and they hesiL tatT? "tO’cTbss a wide strip of white sand. When they try it they are easily seen and killed. - I had a chance to spend only one night in the of Montserrat, but then I learned the necessity of surrounding the house with white sand. Of course no such pains were taken with the mountain cabins, and I made the acquaintance of a fine variety of insects. My arrival at the cabin was very different from the way in which 1 *vent to the Jamaica cabins. There the colored people, though In spi table, were entirely independent, and knew that they could either take me in or send me about my business, as they chose. In Montserrat they are much .more dependent upon the planters; and when Moses, my valet, rode ahead to tell the people of the cabin that behind a guest of- ‘Maws Colonel” would dothem the honor to spend the night in their house, the effect was very much as if some Englishman in New York should receive a cable saying that the Prince of Wales would be over in the Campania to spend a week with him. Moses made no bones about having everything taken out of the room we Were to occupy and making a thorough search for insects. He even pulled up some of the floor boards and poked into the thatch. The first thing he unearthed was the most savage-looking tarantula I ever saw. This fellow, in motion, looked quite as large as the crown of a derby hat; but when we killed him he coiled up into a lump about as bigas your fist. After killing the ground spider, as the negroes call it, Moses found a panful of centipedes and scorpions in the walls and thatch and drove out a few hundred small lizards. I did not mind the lizards, for they are playful as kittens. They are not slimy like our northern liz..ards, but clean and always very pretty. They are precisely like the chameleons the New York girl had a fancy for wearing,, a few months ago. >