they never would hatch or have anything to eat. You never see those eggs. They are dull, chalky seed-looking, little things, buried in smelly places. They hatch out into little white squirmy larvae in twenty-four hours, and eat that decaying stuff. I wouldn't touch it myself! I like the good things on human tables. In less than a week those babies grow as long as I, and shut themselves up in brown cradles.
"Asleep? You wouldn't think so, from all the things that happen in a week's time. Why, they make themselves all over, from little white, crawly, unpleasant grubs into—"
"Beautiful little winged creatures like their mother?"
"Not just at once. When they push the front ends of their cradles off and crawl out, their wings are very small and soft and baggy, and cling close to their sides. Those infant flies are pale and sickly looking. You wouldn't think them likely to live. And they breathe by puffing out their foreheads in the most comical way. I assure you I don't always know my own children.
"Do I have many children? Oh, quite a few. I never keep any account of them. I lay something near a hundred eggs at a time and four times in a season. In just fourteen days after an egg is laid it is hatched, eats, grows, makes a cradle, comes out and is a full-grown fly ready to lay eggs itself. I shouldn't wonder if I would be several times a great grandmother before I die. I'm not saying it to brag. It's a trait of the whole Diptera family."
"Mercy, no wonder there are so many of you!" Mrs. Musca Domestica rubbed her clothes brush legs together, thoughtfully, and washed her face for the third time.
"There are not as many house flies as there used to be. We really threaten to die out. People don't leave as many piles of refuse about for us to lay eggs in. They scald their garbage cans, put lime in plumbing traps, and actually wash stable floors with hose. There are screen doors and windows everywhere. If we do get into a house, there are fly traps and sticky paper to catch us. In some houses there isn't a crumb about. I really wonder such stingy people don't starve themselves. We have other troubles, too. Most of us die of a kind of fungus that paralyzes us, in the fall. Haven't you seen us sitting around, unable to move, with gray bands around our bodies? A few of us do manage to creep into cracks of warm houses, and go to sleep until spring. And there is—
"Did you say spiders??? "Good-by!!!"
See Fly, page 687
