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This peculiarity gained for him from the governor the sobriquet of "old fly-specks." The inn of Mme.

To cut a long story short, he kept on doing this for a day or two, and finally he came down and said he thought he had found that solar system, but it might be fly-specks. So he got a microscope and went back. It turned out better than he feared. He had rousted out our system, sure enough. He got me to describe our planet and its distance from the sun, and then he says to his chief

The brass rod around the bar, which, at my last visit was brightly polished, was now a greenish-black, and there came from it an unpleasant odor of verdigris. The walls were fairly coated with dust, smoke, and fly-specks, and the windows let in the light but feebly through the dirt-obscured glass. The floor was filthy.

The whitewashed walls were smoke-tanned and dotted with millions of fly-specks; the dried corpses of squashed spiders formed large black patches; all four corners of the ceiling were festooned with cobwebs. Saunderson shrugged his shoulders. "This was his den when he first was manager here, in old Morrison's time, and he's stuck to it ever since.

The day was on the wane, and a cooler air came in stronger puffs, and made a view of Epinal, which was fastened to the wall by two pins, flap up and down, the scanty window curtains, which had formerly been white, but were now yellow and covered with fly-specks, looked as if they were going to fly off and seemed to struggle to get away, like the old woman's soul.

There were pictures in once gilt but now time-blackened frames, wherein queerly depicted children and pompous-looking grocers offered one commodity and another, all now almost obliterated by fly-specks. Shelves were marked on the walls by signs now nearly illegible. Cobwebs hung thickly from corners and pillars.

The germs may be carried on the body where they will live but a short time, or they may be carried in the alimentary canal where they will live for a much longer period and are finally deposited in the fly-specks where they retain their virulence for some time. Flies that had been allowed to contaminate themselves with cholera germs were allowed access to milk and meat.

Hideous wallpapers were peeling off the damp and cracking wall, tattered shreds showing, by the accumulation on their fly-specked yellow edges of thick dust, how long they had waved upon the close air of this uncared-for house. All the woodwork was rough and horrid to the touch by reason of the millions of similar fly-specks; had nothing ever been washed here? Cats were alarmingly abundant.

After their first excitement was over, the big flies with the bluish bellies, accompanied by the stinging little ones, returned to their quarters in the windows, where on three tiers of planks, the paint of which was indistinguishable under the fly-specks, were rows of viscous bottles ranged like soldiers. Marie was crying.

I would do the best I could. I would shut my eyes on fly-specks, and open them on the beauties of Nature. I would let the cheerful sun in all day long, in all but the few summer days when coolness is the one thing needful: those days may be soon numbered every year.