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Presently the Abwees sat about the board of a lumbermen's hotel, filled with house-flies and slatternly waiter-girls, who talked familiarly while they served greasy food. The Abwees were yet sore in their minds at the thoughts of the smelly beds up-stairs, and discouragement sat deeply on their souls. But their time was not yet.
For they used this time getting their meals; and whenever they were doing that, they were working for the owner of the barn, paying their rent for the house-lot on the wall by catching grass insects over the meadow, and mosquitoes and horseflies and house-flies by the hundreds, and many another pest, too. Ah, yes, there may be some reason for the belief that swallows bring good luck to men.
I have some reason to believe that he is a God-fearing man, though his religion does not take a er congregational turn. Moreover, he is a sick man." "H'mph!" Miss Oliver sniffed. "The amount of disease disseminated by house-flies is, I am told, incalculable," pursued Mr Hambly.
GEORGE MORLEY. "With all respect for minnows and house-flies, if we found another Shakspeare, he might be better employed, like his predecessor, in selecting individualities from the classifications of man." WAIFE. "Being yourself a man, you think so: a housefly might be of a different opinion.
To me it is most memorable the time when the one with a grouch, who never played, alighted in a moment of absent-mindedness within the taboo precinct and was immediately captured in my hand. Do you know, he sulked for an hour afterward. And the hours were very long in solitary; nor could I sleep them all away; nor could I while them away with house-flies, no matter how intelligent.
My holidays are when I get a rare specimen. My rest is to watch the habits of insects, those that I do not pretend to study. Here is my muscarium, my home for house-flies; very interesting creatures; here they breed and buzz and feed and enjoy themselves, and die in a good old age of a few months.
These two caterpillars and a few house-flies are all I saw, heard, or felt, by day or night, of the native fauna of England, except a few birds, rooks, starlings, a blackbird, and the larks of Salisbury Plain just as they rose; for I lost sight of them almost immediately. I neither heard nor saw the nightingales, to my great regret.
The presence of the larvæ produces very painful and troublesome sores. It has also been suggested that they might reach the subcutaneous tissue by migrating from the alimentary canal as do some of the other bot-flies. A very serious eye disease, Egyptian opthalmia, is known to be spread by the house-flies and others.
At least, they might have been house-flies for all the notice the ratel took of them, save now and then to bunch a dozen or so off his cowled head carelessly. Yet they would probably have nearly killed us.
The plagues of Egypt were upon us; the common house-flies were in billions, in addition to the cattle-tormentor. Our donkeys would not graze, but stood day and night in the dense smoke of fires, made of sticks and green grass, for protection. The plague of boils broke out, and every one was attacked more or less severely.
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