Come to think of it, the Old Folks never made such a fuss about flies as we make nowadays. You cannot pick up a magazine without running plump into an article on the deadly housefly—with pictures of him magnified until he looks like the old million-toed, barrel-eyed, spike-tailed dragon of your boyhood mince-pie dreams. The first two pages convince you that the human race is doomed to extermination within eighteen months by the housefly route!
Grandmother never resorted to very drastic measures. The most violent thing she ever did was to get little Annie, Bridget-the-housewoman's Annie, to help her chase them out. They went from room to room periodically (when flies became too numerous), each armed with an old sawed-off broom-handle on which were tacked long cloth streamers—a sort of cat-o'-nine-tails effect, only with about a score or more of tails. After herding the blue-bottles and all their kith and kin into a fairly compact bunch at the door, little Annie opened the screen and grandmother drove them out—and that's all there was to it.
Another favorite device (particularly in the dining-room and kitchen), was the "fly-gallery"—a wonderful array of multicolored tissue-paper festooned artistically from the ceiling or around the gas-pipes to lure or induce the fly into moments of inactivity. There was no extermination in this device—it was purely preventive in its function—the idea being that since there must be fly-specks, better to mass them as much as possible on places where they would show the least and could be removed the easiest when sufficiently accumulated.
But the greatest ounce-of-prevention was the screen hemisphere. Gee! I haven't thought of that thing for years, have you? Of course you remember it—absolutely fly-proof—one clapped over the butter, another over the crackerbowl, another over the sugar!
And say! I almost forgot! ... (Yes, I know you were just going to speak of it!) ... That conical screen fly-trap where the flies see something good inside, crawl up to the top and then over and in—and then can't get out—but just buzz and buzz and buzz—and make a lot of fuss about it—bluebottles and all—no respecter of persons—and when it gets full of the quick and dead in flydom, Bridget takes it out in the back yard and dumps it. Very simple ... clean, peaceful, effective.
My, My! But it's a far cry back to those days, isn't it? And wouldn't you like right this minute to sneak into the cool, curtain-down, ever-so-quiet dining-room again ... and nose around to see if anything edible bad been overlooked—and see one of those dear old round fly-screens guarding the sugar!
The Autumn Leaves
There were three recognized uses for leaves in the Autumn—first, to be banked by the wind along fences or sidewalk edges and provide kicking-ground for exuberant youngsters returning home from school; second, to be packed around the foundations of the house as a measure for interior comfort in winter; and, third, to be pressed between the pages of the big Bible and kept for ornamental purposes until they crumbled and had to be thrown away. This last-named use was always questioned by every red-blooded boy, and more tolerated than accepted—a concession to the women of earth, from little sister with her bright-hued wreath to mother and grandmother with their book of pressed leaves.
Even for purposes of comfort their use was more or less secondary—granted because the banking-up process was a man's job and an out-door enterprise. Then, too, it was a lot of fun to rake the big yard and get the fallen leaves into one or two huge piles; and wheelbarrow them to the edge of the house where old Spencer had driven the wooden pegs that held the boards ready to receive the leaves. Load after load was dumped into the trough-like arrangement and stamped down tight and hard by old Tom's huge feet and little Willie's eager but ineffective ones—and then the top board was fastened down, and never a cold winter wind could find its way under the floors with such a protective bulwark around the house.... And in the spring the boards had to be taken down—and countless bleached bugs fairly oozed out into the spring sunlight—and the snow-wet soggy leaves were raked out and burned, and the smoke was so thick and heavy that it hardly got out of the yard.