answer no other purpose, for, when the dingy
yellow protectors are taken off the frames on
company days, I declare the said frames are
all over fly-blows. Was it my aunt's delicate
paper fly-perch and her tender attentions
towards the fly family that disarmed their
rage—or (as I am inclined to suspect) were
there fewer flies in those days? It must be
so! London has doubled its population in
the last thirty years. Have the flies been
idle all that time, or have they not doubled
their population too?

What makes me sure of the fact is, the
strange fanciful care my sister Emma (who
is since dead) and myself used to take of the
small wretched residue of the flies in the
winter. Now, they drop by thousands,
clammy and torpid, out of the muslin
curtains when they are drawn; but then we
used to put them into paper boxes, and feed
them with sugar. As was fitting, our cares
had generally a singular and horrible result.
The flies (most mysteriously) used to lose,
first a wing, and then a leg, until they had
scarcely anything left but a body. It was as
if they were returning to second childhood,
and a state of pupa. Yet still we fed them
on, tenderly and undauntedly, and buried
them with due honours.

We once caught our old French master—
le Marquis de Vieuxbois—killing flies, in
order (as he said) to put them out of the
misère. We were sure he had taken a
prominent part in the French Revolution.

There is a change in the scenery of my
ideas. I am seated at dinner in an Italian
albergo (being on a pleasure trip), at a small
table in a corner of a barn-like and very
dirty public room. At a neighbouring table,
a dirty mother is stuffing a very dirty child
with polenta. A dirty waiter is running
about with strange black-looking eatables.
He crams a piece of wood under one of the
legs of my table, which has just given way
and nearly sends the Fritura over my legs.
The thermometer stands at what continentals
call thirty-five degrees of heat (Reaumur),
which answers to about ninety-five of Fahrenheit,
such accompaniments to a dinner may
seem evils—but they are nothing—they are
merged in the flies. The flies darken the
air; harpy-like, the flies pollute the viands.
In vain the waiter, wide-awake to the
nuisance, covers all the dishes with cups, saucers
cabbage leaves, whatever he can lay hands
on for the purpose, and only uncovers at the
moment when I would taste what is set
before me. In one instant, flies are swimming
in the soup, deepening the tints of the
ragout, making a black mass of the butter
swarming, bee-like, round the grape-like
bunches, struggling in the Vino d'Asti!
Eating a dinner? The flies are eating the
dinner, and I am eating the flies.

Then rush into my mind certain verses,

          Busy, curious, thirsty fly,
          Drink with me, and drink as I!

What nauseating nonsense! and is it possible
I could once have repeated that mawkish
Anthology stuff (translated from I know not
what noodle of antiquity) with enthusiasm!
Shakspeare, even, honoured Shakspeare, I
doubt thee here. Did'st thou really call fly-
killing,

          A deed of death done on the innocent?

Did'st thou really expend on such a subject
those golden lines,—

          But how if that fly hath a father and mother?
          How would he hang his slender gilded wings
          And buzz lamenting doings in the air?
          Poor harmless fly!
          That with his pretty buzzing melody,
          Came here to make us merry!

"Merry," too!

Reader, I am, at this present writing, at
the seaside on a hot day, in a beautiful
lodging (so Jane calls it), where I myself am
bottled like a wasp upon a southern wall,
very much plagued with flies, very hot, very
angry, and very ready to sting. Yes! There
it goes! One of those mighty buzzers, those
enormous flesh-flies—emblems of gigantic
fussiness, types of terrific power of boredom
—has just whirled into the apartment, and
continues sharply to whir about, stirring up
the smaller fly gentry, making a preponderant
base to their tiresome treble, dashing
furiously against walls, ceiling, window-panes;
of course never finding its stupid way out
through any widely-opened casement—buzz,
buzz, buzz! Ah! he is silent! Is he gone?
No, only entangled in the muslin curtain,
where he now makes (most unmusical, most
melancholy) a quivering, dithering sound,
like a watch running down when the main
spring is broken. Then loose again, and
da-capo, with his buzz, buzz! fuss, fuss!—
then really resting for a few moments, only
to get up fresh energy, and make his drone
the worse for the short relief of silence. I
must let out my rage. "Nothing relieves a
man," says Burns, "like a good hearty blast
of execration." O, thou world-old plague,
thou abominable Baalzebub (for that is thy
true Satanic name; a name that means, in
good old Syriac, a muck-fly, truly indicative
of thy nature and lineage), did not the
ancient enemy of mankind, as soon as he
had succeeded in his designs under the
serpent's form, resume thine, the true aboriginal
fly-form, that he might for ever plague those
whom, having injured, he hated? Is it not
under the form of a fly that thou has sucked
old women in the nape of the neck, leaving
thy hateful mark behind, whereby poor old
Dame Alice, or Mother Samwell (as the
case might be), was convicted of witchcraft
and commerce with the devil, and so was
ducked till she was drowned, or was burnt
at the stake, or was hanged by the neck till
she was dead?

To drop the apostrophical style, which in