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Updated: May 11, 2025
The amusing thing about the buzzing was that calves that were out for the first time, and had never made the acquaintance of a gad-fly, instantly set off running, with tail erect, when they heard its angry buzz. Pelle had a remote ideal, which was to lie upon some elevated place and direct the whole flock by the sole means of his voice, and never need to resort to punishment.
Such was the irrepressible prophet who troubled the Israel of slave-holding Quakerism, clinging like a rough chestnut-bur to the skirts of its respectability, and settling like a pertinacious gad-fly on the sore places of its conscience.
There is the grove of Io, whom the gad-fly drave over the earth, and there on the left hand the temple of Heré, which all men know, and before us the palace of the children of Pelops, a house of many woes, from which I carried thee forth in time past, when thy mother would have slain thee.
Is your conscience unmoved by the responsibility of some one else's unhappiness? Can you be made love to without a haunting suspicion that you brought it on yourself?" "Good heavens, no!" cried Riatt from the heart. "Then, run while there's time." As the ox fears the gad-fly and the elephant the mouse, so does the bravest of men fear the emotional entanglement of any making but his own.
For, if you should put me to death, you will not easily find such another, though it may be ridiculous to say so, altogether attached by the deity to this city as to a powerful and generous horse, somewhat sluggish from his size, and requiring to be roused by a gad-fly; so the deity appears to have united me, being such a person as I am, to the city, that I may rouse you, and persuade and reprove every one of you, nor ever cease besetting you throughout the whole day.
The allegory of Io and the gad-fly in the heathen mythology, must surely have been intended to represent the being who, like myself, was tormented by a bad conscience. Like Io I flew; and like her, I was pursued by the eternal gad-fly, wherever I went; and in vain did I try to escape it. I passed the Great St. Bernard on foot. This interested me as I approached it.
We find an Emperor addressing an ode to a dragon-fly which avenges him on a gad-fly; we find a prince reciting impromptu stanzas while he lays siege to the place whither his brother has fled for refuge; we find a heartbroken lady singing a verselet as for the last time she ties the garters of her lord going to his death, and we find a sovereign corresponding in verse with his consort whose consent to his own dishonour he seeks to win.
The gad-fly was vexing him, and he had to move. For a year, he had wandered, realizing every day the truth of Horace's philosophy for those who travel, that a man cannot change his feelings with his climate, until finally he had found himself, as every wanderer does, at Charing Cross. At this point, he had tried to rally. Such running away, he told himself, was futile.
It must, however, be borne in mind that the warbles are the larvæ of the oestrus bovis, which is said to be the most beautiful variety of gad-fly. This fly, judging from the objects of its attack, must be particularly choice in its selection of animals upon which to deposit its eggs, as it rarely chooses those poor in flesh, or in an unhealthy condition.
And Bedwyr caught it, and flung it, and pierced Yspadaden Penkawr grievously with it through the knee. Then he said, "A cursed ungentle son-in-law, truly! I shall ever walk the worse for his rudeness, and shall ever be without a cure. This poisoned iron pains me like the bite of a gad-fly. Cursed be the smith who forged it, and the anvil on which it was wrought! So sharp is it!"
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