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Updated: June 17, 2025
Its fragility may be imagined from the fact that it broke twice before I got it back into its box; still there was, I am sure, not another girl in Cleveland who could have found for sale a fly-trap at Christmas time. The straightforward one had presented me with an expensively repellent gift in the form of a brown earthenware jug, a cross between a Mexican idol and a pitcher.
But we must not be carried away by these more showy plants to the exclusion of some very curious and interesting little things which I see we are in danger of forgetting. Here, carefully covered by a bell-glass, is a fine specimen of Dionæa muscipula, or Venus's fly-trap. Every reader of natural history is familiar with its economy; but one does not often get a sight of it.
Voice, beak, legs, head everything but wings and maw was sacrificed for a mouth. What a mouth! The bird can almost swallow himself. Such a cleft in the head could never mean a song; it could never be utilized for anything but a fly-trap. We have use for fly-traps. We need some birds just to sit around, look pretty, and warble. We will pay them for it in cherries or in whatever they ask.
The grey-headed Domenico Cennini laughed no less heartily than the younger men, and Nello was triumphantly secure of the general admiration. "Aha!" he exclaimed, snapping his fingers when the first burst of laughter was subsiding. "I have cleared my piazza of that unsavoury fly-trap, mi pare.
"I hope he'll not fall into one of the openings." "Is there any danger?" asked Mark. "I'm afraid there is," the inventor added. "Those plants are a variety of the well-known pitcher plant, or fly-trap, as they are sometimes called. In tropical countries they grow to a large size, but nothing like these. They are filled, in the cup, with a sort of sticky, sweet mixture, and this attracts insects.
And the Dionaea, or Venus's Fly-trap of the Southern States, has some leaves which fold together upon any insect that alights upon their upper surface; and by means of a row of long spines that fringes the leaves, they prevent his escape. The more active the struggles of the captive, the closer grows the hold of the leaf, and speedily destroys him.
That it was a fly-trap one big sage-looking insect seemed certain, for he settled on the tip of Private Sim's nose, and seemed to be engaged in making sudden flights and buzzings at young unwary flies as they came near and into danger, driving them away from the yawning cavern just below. Gray smiled to himself as these ideas flashed across his brain, and then he walked up to the sergeant.
When I called a meeting and suggested that they raise more money among themselves to relieve the present situation and protect their interests, they cut me off at the pockets. "That Fly-trap King of yours said, 'If that's all you got us together for, Mudge, we might as well get to hell out of here because I, for one, don't propose to put another cent into the proposition "My Wife Won't Let Me."
Now that same old man, the mortal that was called by his name and has passed for the same person for some scores of years, is considered absurdly sentimental by kind-hearted women, because he opens the fly-trap and sets all its captives free, out-of-doors, of course, but the dear souls all insisting, meanwhile, that the flies will, every one of them, be back again in the house before the day is over.
"A still more singular instance of this kind was recently discovered in Carolina," remarked Becker; "it is called the fly-trap.
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