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"Well, I have fairly steady nerves, as you know, Mr. Holmes, but I give you my word that I got a shake when I put my head into that little house. It was droning like a harmonium with the flies and bluebottles, and the floor and walls were like a slaughter-house. He had called it a cabin, and a cabin it was sure enough, for you would have thought that you were in a ship.
It's the savings of an industrious life, lad," added Mr. Balfour, pathetically; "and I should be sorry to think, if any thing happened to me, that it should lie there useless, or be found accidental like, and perhaps fall into the hands of the bluebottles. Your memory's good, my lad, I dare say, and you won't forget the number nor the street."
Lions, tigers, jackals, hyaenas, boa-constrictors, kangaroos, eagles, owls, bees, wasps, bluebottles, with Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and their wives, all in one fierce melee. But the contention for the precious vital air must, however violent, have soon subsided: fifteen minutes would have settled them all.
Musk roses, honeysuckle and virgin's bower, climbed on the old grey walls; sops-in-wine, bluebottles, bachelor's buttons, stars of Bethlehem and the like, filled the borders; May thorns were in full sweet blossom; and near one another were the two rose- bushes, one damask and one white provence, whence Somerset and Warwick were said to have plucked their fatal badges; while on the opposite side of a broad grass-plot was another bush, looked on as a great curiosity of the best omen, where the roses were streaked with alternate red and white, in honour, as it were, of the union of York and Lancaster.
Hitherto he had only felt safe in the inn, and then only when he was quite alone with his glass and the buzzing bluebottles that flew up and down the dull window-pane. And now they were spoiling that for him too. He gazed at the laughing men as though they were his enemies.
Ah, those dear butterfly creatures will come to the nasty sticky papers that were meant to catch bluebottles only; well, then, they must take the consequences. What! Lady Merivale the fair Eveline. Does she want to borrow money?" "She dabbles in the Stock Exchange. I know her business man; he owes us money, sir, and we know some of his secrets.
"Well, I have fairly steady nerves, as you know, Mr. Holmes, but I give you my word, that I got a shake when I put my head into that little house. It was droning like a harmonium with the flies and bluebottles, and the floor and walls were like a slaughter-house. He had called it a cabin, and a cabin it was, sure enough, for you would have thought that you were in a ship.
After that comes silence; and we are able, in our hot, baking trenches, assisted by clouds of bluebottles, to get on with the day's work. This consists almost entirely in digging. As already stated, these are bad trenches.
It is not one, but twenty-five thousand brooms which advance to destroy his airy home; to invade his household gods, and bring to the ground that row of bluebottles which his magnifying power of vision has transformed from one to twenty-five thousand! nay, more, perhaps!
My mate and I, as we adjusted our stretcher at a cot's side, and braced ourselves against the weight of the patient, winked covertly at one another. "A nasty one for the Bluebottles!" he said. And it was. All the same I seize this opportunity of offering my homage to the Bluebottles. They have done are still doing their bit, and that right nobly.
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