26 OCTOBER 1945, Page 14

English Locusts An unexpected acknowledgement of the perfection of mid-October

weather greeted me as I sat in a little south-looking verandah. Two large grasshoppers came to sun themselves on the warm concrete Boor, and two unexpected butterflies, a Painted Lady and a Comma, flew over their heads. It is surprising how little is heard of our grasshoppers, of which the long-horned sort are rare, and the short-horns (which are in classification locusts) do no harm to anyone. Different species have different instruments for scraping out their quaint music, and one of the commonest, the meadow grasshopper, which hops an inordinate distance by the agency of its kangaroo-like hind legs, has lost the power of flight. It retains the frog's and chameleon's capacity to change colour.