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Updated: June 21, 2025
There was a pleasant light in this church; the hum of a country bluebottle made all the difference to the quality of silence. No critical thought stirred within him, nor any excitement.
The ordinary bluebottle, on the contrary, which lays her eggs upon butcher's meat or carrion, lays them in enormous batches. Trusting in the inexhaustible riches represented by the corpse, she is prodigal of offspring, and takes no account of numbers. In other cases the provision is acquired by audacious brigandage, which exposes the newly born offspring to a thousand mortal accidents.
Our window suffered occasionally; but whether it were broken heads, or broken limbs, or broken windows, they were well paid for. Everyone suffered but Mr Phineas Cophagus, who never suffered a patient to escape him. The shop had the usual allowance of green, yellow, and blue bottles; and in hot weather, from our vicinity, we were visited by no small proportion of bluebottle flies.
My old acquaintance, Percy the bluebottle, looking wonderfully fit despite his years, was doing deep breathing exercises on a mutton cutlet, and was too busy to do more than pause for a moment to nod at me; but his cousin, Harold, always active, sighted me and bustled up to do the honours.
Kingston's partner," and the Kingstons themselves had the sort of sense that he was too much for them which makes a spider dislike to have a bluebottle in his web. She was interested, too, rather sadly in the crusade without the cross that the two young men were trying to undertake against the wretchedness of those potters.
Certainly we are starting at the bottom of the ladder. These trenches are badly sited, badly constructed, difficult of access from the rear, and swarming with large, fat, unpleasant flies, of the bluebottle variety. They go to sleep, chiefly upon the ceiling of one's dug-out, during the short hours of darkness, but for twenty hours out of twenty-four they are very busy indeed.
I have just served up a Linnet shot two days ago. I next place in the cage a bluebottle, one only, to avoid confusion. Her fat belly proclaims the advent of a laying time. An hour later, when the excitement of being put in prison is allayed, my captive is in labor.
"There," cried the emperor at this moment, striking with the fly- flap at the wall, "that will at length put an end to your humming, with which you have dinned my ears for a quarter of an hour. Come here, Hudelist, and look at this bluebottle fly. The whole time while you were reading I was chasing it, and have only just got it. Did you ever see so large a fly?"
It follows from all this that, to lay her eggs, the Bluebottle picks out either naked wounds or else the mucous membranes of the mouth or eyes, which are not protected by a skin of any thickness. She also needs darkness. The perfect efficiency of the paper bag, which prevents the inroads of the worms through the eye-sockets or the beak, suggests a similar experiment with the whole bird.
When we were not at the conference, I spent long hours, among crumbs and bluebottle flies, in the coffee-room of this hotel, my Father being busy at the British Museum and the Royal Society. The conference was held in an immense hall, somewhere in the north of London. I remember my short-sighted sense of the terrible vastness of the crowd, with rings on rings of dim white faces fading in the fog.
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