[Illustration: THE LOCUST.]
Did you ever _see_ as well as hear a grasshopper? The locust is an insect
of the same kind, and I have heard that African locusts in the first stage
of their life are as green as grasshoppers, but wingless--though they
afterwards have very pretty wings. They are described as crowding together,
"standing upon each other in heaps four or five deep, or gradually
advancing over each other's backs, eating all before them."
A flight of locusts is indeed a wonderful sight. An African traveller once
saw advancing towards him a dark cloud; the seeming storm came nearer and
nearer; ah! it was no snow-storm or hail-storm, but a living cloud of
locusts. He thus describes it, as it came upon him and his companions:
"Each flake of snow was a locust; we stood with our backs to them, and
they struck us over the face and ears; we had to protect our eyes with our
hands; the ground where the flight had settled was soon bare, and the trees
leafless." Can you wonder that such a storm-cloud should be dreaded beyond
any other, and that when the Egyptian sky was darkened by it--and "before
them there were no such locusts as they"--Pharaoh besought that God might
be entreated to take away this "death" from him and from his land? And they
were not the only creatures used by God at that time to punish the proud
and wilful king who refused to let His people go that they might serve Him.
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