The Fly
By and by the other creatures would be distributed here and there about
the earth—scattered: the tigers to India, the lions and the elephants
to the vacant desert and the secret places of the jungle, the birds to
the boundless regions of empty space, the insects to one or another
climate, according to nature and requirement; but the fly? He is of no
nationality; all the climates are his home, all the globe is his
province, all creatures that breathe are his prey, and unto them all he
is a scourge and a hell.
To man he is a divine
ambassador, a minister plenipotentiary, the Creator's special
representative. He infests him in his cradle; clings in bunches to his
gummy eyelids; buzzes and bites and harries him, robbing him of his
sleep and his weary mother of her strength in those long vigils which
she devotes to protecting her child from this pest's persecutions. The
fly harries the sick man in his home, in the hospital, even on his
deathbed at his last gasp. Pesters him at his meals; previously hunts
up patients suffering from loathsome and deadly diseases; wades in
their sores, gaums its legs with a million death-dealing germs; then
comes to that healthy man's table and wipes these things off on the
butter and discharges a bowel-load of typhoid germs and excrement on
his batter-cakes. The housefly wrecks more human constitutions and
destroys more human lives than all God's multitude of misery messengers
and death-agents put together.
|