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[Page 199]

3.

short cuts are not to be recommended. During the day it is interesting to see the method of keeping the locusts from the crops of lucerne. I might mention here that last week another plague of locusts visited the locality. They seem to come in flights, sometimes so dense that they darken the sky overhead. The method of keeping them away is to collect all the children of the surrounding villages. These are divided into groups under a leader, and each child is provided with a switch. A group will then form up in single line and advance across the field like "beaters". In this way they drive all the locusts before them - into somebody else's patch. I suppose this goes on until the locusts die of exhaustion or starvation in the field a patch the owner of which does not command enough of "almighty piastre" wherewith to hire the youth of his village.

Smaller switches than those used by the lowest hunters are used by the fly-hunters. Baring natives every one in Egypt becomes an inveterate fly hunter during the summer months. The only natives who use these horse-hair switches are those employed in shops. A boy or man is taken on as a hand to do nothing else but chase the flies about. Really I believe the native thinks he is there to exercise them

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