Page:Under the Sun.djvu/80

56 but feeble folk compared with their banded congener of England, the ruffian in glossy velvet and deep yellow, who assails one at all hours of the summer’s day, lurking in fallen fruit, making grocers’ shops as dangerous as viper-pits, an empty sugar-keg a very cockatrice den, and spreading dismay at every picnic. But the wasp points this moral, — that it requires no brains to annoy. A wasp stings as well without its head as with it.

Flies, too, now assume a prominence to which they are in no way entitled by their merits. Luther hated flies quia sunt imagines diaboli et hæreticorum; and, with a fine enthusiasm worthy of the great Reformer, he smote Beelzebub in detail. “I am,” he said one day, as he sat at his dinner, his Boswell (Lauterbach) taking notes under the table, “I am a great enemy unto flies, for when I have a good book they flock upon it, parade up and down upon it, and soil it.” So Luther used to kill them with all the malignity of the early Christian. And indeed the fly deserves death. It has no delicacy, and hints are thrown away upon the importunate insect. With a persistent insolence it returns to your nose, perching irreverently upon the feature, until sudden death cuts short its ill-mannered career. In this matter my sympathies are rather with that Roman Emperor who impaled on pins all the flies he could catch, than with Uncle Toby who, when he had in his power a ruffianly bluebottle, let it go out of the window, — to fly into his neighbor’s house and vex him. The only consolation is that the neighbor probably killed it.

The sun is hardly up yet, so the doors are open. From the garden come the sounds of chattering hot-weather birds. “While eating,” said the Shepherd, “say little, but look friendly;” but the starlings (to give them