So, then, may we “with an unfaltering trust approach our grave,” and, as Schiller says so musically:
Ich kann nicht mit der linken Hand schreiben.
XL
THE PROPER CARE OF FLIES
It is a fact beyond cavil that ninety-nine flies out of a hundred perish every year for lack of proper care on the part of housewives; that the attention that is lavished upon the house-cat, if expended upon the house-fly, would cause him to stay with us throughout the twelvemonth.
I have devoted years of patient study to the busy buzzers, and I speak as one having authority. Flies need warmth as much as humans do—nay, more than their biped brethren, for we can stand the early autumn frosts without a fire, but it is those few days that kill off the little fellows that have been our winged companions through the summer season, singing in the new day, sampling our butter and meats, and tickling us half to death with their erratic pilgrimages and divagations. A little forethought on our part, a speedier lighting of the furnace fires, and flies in midwinter would no longer be a rarity.
This well-nigh universal carelessness is due to a woeful ignorance as to the habits of the fly, and not to intentional cruelty. Why, we know more about the ways of the wapiti than of the most common occupant of our houses. To give an instance, most people refer to the fly as a scavenger, a lover of tainted meats and vegetables. This is only because he is so often forced to eat tainted meat or go without altogether. There are fresh milk and fish for the cat, dainty tidbits for the dog, millet and rape for the canary; yet how many Christian people think to provide something tempting for the flies? But too often we begrudge them the crumbs that fall from the table.
So far from flies loving “high” meat, it is an acquired taste with them. This had long been a theory with me, but it is only a year since I proved it by an interesting experiment. I secured a setting of flies’ eggs,—not thoroughbred eggs, but just the ordinary barn-yard variety,—and I set them under a motherly bluebottle fly, after I had made her a comfortable nest in a pill-box. I saw to it that she had the proper food for a setting fly—not mush and milk, but flakes of hominy and grains of sugar once a day. I also dusted her nest thoroughly with insecticide and covered her with a tea-strainer so that she would be secure from molestation from other flies. For three weeks she was faithful to her duties, and then, one morning, I saw that she had experienced the sweet joys of motherhood, for there, on the edge of her nest, sat thirteen—mark the number—cunning little flies, pluming and preening themselves with innate skill. I could scarce keep back the tears.