The Passing of the Flies.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXX, Issue 14, 3 April 1902, Page 18

The Passing of the Flies.

_ The house flies are beginning to disappear. You nay have noticed this yourself, but it is a pleasure to meniion it. They have finished inspecting the bumps of the bald-headed men, and I am pleased to Bay that they find them up to the average. They go away happy in the thought that they have left their foot prints on every pat of butter and plate of jam they could see—where, perhaps, the foot of a fly had never trod before. They rejoice that they have had swimming tournaments in every vessel that contained enough milk to preclude the possibility of any ' fly ' fly swimming with one leg on the bottom. They know thaL they have never found a hot and perspiring man that they didn't make hit himself ten times on the back of his neck with his open hand, and they are going away to that place where flies go to every year, with the small still voice of conscious rectitude simply singing comic songs inside their little vests. There, until next spring, each fly will rest in smug contentment, hugging himself around the neck with his two front legs or patting himself on the back with his two hind onea, just as he does when he lands on the collar of the man who kneels in front of you in church. It is some consolation to know the scientific fact that all these little creatures which are so ' aggravoying' have their own little worries. A poet, writing of a fmt cousin by marriage of the fly, sawed this scientific fact into lengths and built this verse with the pieces. ' Big fleas have little fleas Upon their backs to bite 'em ; And even these have smaller fleas And so ad injinlti/m.'