There are two main nurseries for the Common Fly in all our cities, yes, and in our country homes as well—the Stable and the Kitchen.
Unless stables are kept with the most absolute cleanliness flies are bred there.
Unless kitchens are kept in the most absolute cleanliness flies are bred there—or therefrom! Moreover the smell of hot food draws flies from afar; a kitchen even though spotless and screened is a constant bait for flies.
I was once visiting in a fine clean summer camp in the Adirondacks, where friends in combination did the work. In the main room of this place was a wide long window—one great picture, framing the purple hills. It was a good deal of work to clean that window, and we took turns at it. One day this window was laboriously polished inside and out by an earnest gentleman of high ideals. Then—in the kitchen—some one cooked a cabbage. Forthwith that front-room window was black with flies—big, bumping, buzzing, blue-bottle flies. To slay them was a carnage—and they were carried out by the dustpanful.
In the country, by screening every window and door, by constant watch upon each article of food to keep it covered, one may keep one's own flies bumping vainly on the outside of one's own house—except when people go in and out, and the ever-ready buzzer darts in before the swing-door shuts.
But in the city, where a million homes maintain their million fly-baiting kitchens, and each kitchen maintains its garbage pail, the problem becomes more serious.
Let us face this fact. In the residence part of a city the kitchen is almost the only source of dirt.
The kitchen-stove furnishes its quota of coal-dust, coal-gas and coal ashes. But for the kitchen a heating plant could warm many blocks of houses, and keep that source of dirt at a minimum, thus clearing our streets of the ash-can and ash-cart nuisances.
The kitchen is wholly responsible for the garbage pail; each area or alley gate offering for inspection and infection its unsavory receptacle; and beyond that, the kitchen is in large measure responsible for the stable. In the quiet streets where people live, the horses which defile those streets, which break the quiet, wear the pavement, and wring the hearts of lovers of animals, are almost all kitchen horses.
At early dawn the milkman's horse—many milkmen's horses. Then the baker's horse—many bakers' horses. Then the iceman's horse, the fishman's horse, the market man's horse, the vegetable man's horse, the grocer's horse, the confectioner's horse; with, of course, the ashman's horse, the garbage man's horse, and the coal man's horse. All these horses and their various stables, help to maintain the breeding of flies; and the kitchen maintains them.