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The drowsy hum of the kettle on the kitchen fire, and the steady, low hum of the house-fly dance in the middle of the room, would be answered in the long, hot afternoons by her wicked warning drone as she came sailing in at the open window, like the insolent pirate that she was, to go out again a minute later with a helpless fly between her jaws.
The day was again distressingly hot; the thermometer in the afternoon rising to 104 degrees in the shade, which so late in April is something extraordinary. The girls seemed greatly to enjoy sitting in the fine shade made by our awnings. The common house-fly swarmed about us in thousands of decillions, and though we were attended by houris, I at least did not consider myself in Paradise.
The last of the Ceylon bees is the most tiny, although an equally industrious workman. He is a little smaller than our common house-fly, and he builds his diminutive nest in the hollow of a tree, where the entrance to his mansion is a hole no larger than would be made by a lady's stiletto.
The head only and the upper portion of the breast are devoured: the rest the plump abdomen, the best part of the thorax, the legs and lastly, of course, the wing-stumps is flung aside untouched. Does this mean that the tenderest and most succulent morsels are chosen? No, for the belly is certainly more juicy; and the Empusa refuses it, though she eats up her House-fly to the last particle.
If you took up a bucketful, you would find that the colour was due to myriads of tiny creatures. Amongst these are other myriads of small animals, each of less size than a house-fly. The larger ones are there to feed on the smaller ones. And that mass of small life is the food of this mountain of fat and flesh, the Greenland Whale.
At the close of a sunny day the western sky has a softened aspect: its color, we say, has warmth in it On such a day you may meet a caterpillar on the footpath, and turn out for him. The house-fly thaws out; a company of cheerful wasps take possession of a chamber-window. It is oppressive indoors at night, and the window is raised. A flock of millers, born out of time, flutter in.
There were no insects, except one kind of fly about one-fourth the size of the common house-fly. It bit cruelly, and was much more tormenting than the mosquito on the sea-coast. This seems to be the native country of the arrowroot. Wherever you passed through a patch of wood in a low situation, there you found it growing luxuriantly.
The house-fly has about four thousand eye-lenses; the cabbage butterfly, and the dragon-fly, about seventeen thousand; and some species of beetles have twenty-five thousand. We cannot begin to think in what an agitated world the insect lives, thrilling and vibrating to a degree that would drive us insane. If we possessed the same microscopic gifts, how would the aspect of the world be changed!
Altogether the larvæ of over twenty different species of flies have been found in or expelled from the human intestinal canal. The same species is very common in the United States, frequently occurring in houses. Under certain conditions it may even be more abundant than the house-fly.
There is in La Plata a small very common Dendrocolaptine bird Anumbius acuticaudatus much infested by an Ornithomyia, a pretty, pale insect, half the size of a house-fly, and elegantly striped with green.
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