Seed tick, and red worms are small insects, that annoy the people by day, as musquitoes and chinches do by night; but both these keep out of your way, if you keep out of theirs; for seed ticks are no where to be met with, but in the track of cattle, upon which the great ticks fatten, and fill their skins so full of blood, that they drop off, and wherever they happen to fall, they produce a kind of egg, which lies about a fortnight before the seedlings are hatched. These seedlings run in swarms up the next blade of grass that lies in their way; and then the first thing that brushes that blade of grass, gathers off most of these vermin, which stick like burs upon anything that touches them. They void their eggs at the mouth.
Red worms lie only in old dead trees, and rotten logs; and without sitting down upon such, a man never meets with them, nor at any other season, but only in the midst of summer. A little warm water immediately brings off both seed ticks and red worms, though they lie ever so thick upon any part of the body. But without some such remedy they will be troublesome; for they are so small that nothing will lay hold of them, but the point of a penknife, needle, or such like. But if nothing be done to remove them, the itching they occasion goes away after two days.
§ 81. Their winters are very short, and don't continue above three or four months, of which they have seldom thirty days of unpleasant weather, all the rest being blest with a clear air, and a bright sun. However, they have very hard frost sometimes, but it rarely lasts above three or four days, that is, till the wind change: for if it blow not between the north and north-west points, from the cold Appalachian mountains, they have no frost at all. But these frosts are attended with a serene sky, and are otherwise made delightful by the tameness of the wild fowl and other game, which by their incredible number, afford the pleasantest shooting in the world.
Their rains, except in the depth of winter, are extremely agreeable and refreshing. All the summer long they last but a few hours at a time, and sometimes not above half an hour, and then immediately succeeds clear sunshine again. But in that short time it rains so powerfully, that it quits the debt of a long drought, and makes everything green and gay.