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Updated: July 7, 2025
Look at those disgusting children!" He pointed to the groups of pale mites, with yellow skins and frail bodies, who were paying like puppies in the garbage of the narrow pathway; their faces were covered with large black house-flies they hung in clusters from their eyes and ears and from the corners of their mouths. "Aiwah, Effendi, but these people will live in no other surroundings.
In the kitchen the cook was dozing over the half-baked meats in front of the smouldering fire; the butler was snoring in the pantry; the dairy-maid was quietly napping among the milk-pans; and even the house-flies had gone to sleep over the crumbs of sugar on the table.
Watching the couples whirl and turn, advance and recede as gently as spirits, knot themselves like house-flies and part again, and lullabied by the faint regular beat of their footsteps to the tune, the players sank into the peculiar mesmeric quiet which comes over impressionable people who play for a great length of time in the midst of such scenes; and at last the only noises that Christopher took cognizance of were those of the exceptional kind, breaking above the general sea of sound a casual smart rustle of silk, a laugh, a stumble, the monosyllabic talk of those who happened to linger for a moment close to the leafy screen all coming to his ears like voices from those old times when he had mingled in similar scenes, not as servant but as guest.
The thick wood was the true whisk to brush away all the naggings and perplexities that swarmed, like house-flies in the cleared lands. Nance Jane, the cow that did not know enough to come home at milking-time, knew that. In the hot weather, when the blood-sucking horse-flies and sweat-bees were worst, she would crash through the thickest underbrush and so be swept clean of her tormentors.
"T' god o' flies taks out his book an' begins to read t' list: 'Five hunderd mawks, three hunderd atter-cops, two hunderd an' fifty bummle-bees. 'Bummle-bees! Bummle-bees! says Satan. 'What's t' gooid o' them, I'd like to know? How mony house-flies, how mony blue-bottles hasta sent? and wi' that he rives t' book out o' Beelzebub's hands and turns ower t' pages hissen.
On warm bright days without wind, during the absence of the birds, I have frequently seen a company of from half a dozen to a dozen or fifteen of the parasitical fly wheeling about in the air above the nest, hovering and gambolling together, just like house-flies in a room in summer; but always on the appearance of the birds, returning from their feeding-ground, they would instantly drop down and disappear into the nest.
The flies then awoke, refreshed but hungry, and determined to make the most of a good opportunity. The house-flies of the North, when compared to those of the South, seem to have been well brought up, and trained to live with human beings on terms of civility, if not of friendship.
Sometimes they went into a small hole in the side of the tree and at other times they entered their homes by a small knot-hole in a limb near the top of the tree. I saw that a swarm which father once found went into the tree top more than eighty feet from the ground. At that distance they did not appear larger than house-flies.
Whilst white men have developed an almost automatic resistance and objection to the visits of flies to their lips, eyelids, and any wound or scratch of the skin a resistance which is not shown by many savage races they yet allow house-flies to swarm in their dwellings, to run about and sample their food, with an indifference which is, when the truth is known, truly horrible in its fatuity and foolhardiness.
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.
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