Survival Till Seventeen

My favorite word is “little.” At least I use it more than I do other words. It occurs so frequently in my earlier work that I have been tempted to go back and delete it here and there. It occurs in the title of one of my books: In Towns and Little Towns; in the titles of many of my poems, such as “The Little Kingdom of Thingdom”; and in the titles of several of my sketches: “My Little Minister” and “This Little Thing.” In the writing of my biography of Mother Seton, called An American Woman, I resort to the word “little” so often that it is practically an impediment in my speech. One of my critics was quick to notice this and sent me a devastating parody of my own style, which ran as follows:

“Dear little Leonard Feeney. I read your little book on America’s first little sisters-school nun, little Mother Seton. I think she is the nicest little nun I have ever read about, and you do say the most charming little things in her praise. Won’t you please write us other little books on kindred little subjects, so as to make our little hearts a little more happy?”

A man can survive such ridicule only with the aid of prayer. Another of my critics, a married lady, writing in one of the weekly reviews, scores not only the frequency of the word “little” in my vocabulary, but its essential inappropriateness to some of my ideas. “The author,” she says of me, “refers to a nun as ‘a little lady all consecrated to God,’ whereas we all know that many nuns are large, impressive persons, born to command.”

I did not answer this enormous matron, for I believe in free criticism; but had I, I could have defended myself to some extent.

I think that “little” is definitely a Catholic epithet, used not in a dimensional, but in an appropriative sense. We call anything little that we like so much we want to make it small enough to consider it our own. There is an order of nuns in the Church known, one and all, as The Little Sisters of the Poor. But they do not weigh their postulants before receiving, nor send them reducing exercises so as to establish vocations. Our Lord speaks of the whole Church as His “little flock.” Saint Francis of Assisi is known as “The Little Poor Man,” and Saint Thérèse of Lisieux as “The Little Flower.” Even Saint Ignatius, perhaps given to diminutives least of all the Saints, refers to the regiment of his spiritual soldiers as “this little Society of Jesus.”

I have a further propensity for the word “little,” because it is mostly in small things that I am largely interested. Had I become a scientist, I should have been an astronomer among the biologists, with microscope for telescope, peering into worlds beneath me, studying my heavens upside down.

At any rate, I think that not even the most captious of my critics will object to the word “little” as applied to a mosquito.

Of all the world of little things a mosquito makes the loudest noise. If you, proportionate to your weight, could make as loud a noise singing, as he does, proportionate to his when he whines, you would sound like all the factory whistles of Bethlehem Steel going off in a simultaneous blast. You would literally blow the roof off.

I first became acquainted with the little mosquito (he always seems to be the same mosquito) when I was a little boy lying in bed. First I shall tell you what he did to me harmfully, and then what he did to me by way of help.

By way of harm, he cost my father hundreds of dollars. It was the summer I contracted malaria and was quarantined for three months. This malaria was the work of one mosquito. He 1 raised my temperature five degrees, and sent me into such a series of fevers and chills that our neighbors, alarmed at my plight, and fearing contagion, would not let their children admit to ever having known me.

This same mosquito caused my mother to invest in innumerable hot water bottles and in at least a thousand pounds of ice. I wore out two ice men in the course of the summer.

My parents went scurrying to neighboring stores to purchase soups and broths of such exotic kinds and flavors that the grocers advised my mother to buy her canned goods wholesale.

Still the work of one mosquito.

And what he did to me by way of upsetting my environment was nothing to what he did to me inside my head.

Have you ever seen an elephant uproot Bunker Hill Monument and hurl it like a javelin across East Boston Harbor?

Well, I did, thanks to one little mosquito.

Were you ever lost for a thousand years in a dark, lonely forest, and did you eat lobsters with a giant who had street-lamps for eyes? . . . Then you never met the mosquito I met.

Were you ever, in a delirium, the only being in existence, without father or mother or friend or any one to know you or love you; with your whole body seething like a furnace, your head a conflagration of distorted ideas, your soul cindered down to the last ash, your will clinging to the last remnants of religion . . . calling to God, to Mary, to Jesus, to come and either deliver or destroy you, asking where everyone was but yourself, promising never again to be naughty . . . if only, if only, if only, if only, you could have ice on your forehead, ice on your feet, ice to hold, ice to listen to, ice to eat . . .

Do you wonder that the subject of the mosquito impresses me, and that I dedicate to it a chapter from the pages of my youth?

The little mosquito is hatched in the afternoon, in the warmth of a pleasant swamp.

Ten minutes later he is a finished aviator, ready for flight.

He is merely a bit of gauze informed with animation, and so delicate you could not weigh him on a pharmacist’s scale. Yet he knows to a nicety all the currents of air and can balance himself skillfully in the most formidable breeze.

After less than an hour of personal tuning, he begins a flight more remarkable than Lindbergh’s. He sails to the nearest dwellinghouse to await the retirement of the sleeper. Disregarding the basement and the bedless lower floors, he finds the sleeping-chamber and the slumbering little boy.

Daintily he alights on some susceptible part of the body, and studies carefully the mechanics of the operation. He braces himself solidly, summons all his strength, and inserts his dagger accurately in a narrow little pore.

He deposits his poison, and extracts his toll of blood.

He makes another take-off, whining contentedly, and is wafted by the wind to his sources in the swamp.

By midnight he is the father of a hundred little mosquitoes, who will follow on the morrow the example of their sire.

It is an astounding performance.

It is one of the most remarkable feats in the history of the world.


1 The scientists tell me it is the female mosquito, not the male, that carries disease germs. But I prefer, chivalrously, to blame it on the male.