Come to think of it, the Old Folks never made such a fuss about flies
as we make nowadays. You cannot pick up a magazine without running
plump into an article on the deadly housefly--with pictures of him
magnified until he looks like the old million-toed, barrel-eyed,
spike-tailed dragon of your boyhood mince-pie dreams. The first two
pages convince you that the human race is doomed to extermination
within eighteen months by the housefly route!
Grandmother never resorted to very drastic measures. The most violent
thing she ever did was to get little Annie, Bridget-the-housewoman's
Annie, to help her chase them out. They went from room to room
periodically (when flies became too numerous), each armed with an old
sawed-off broom-handle on which were tacked long cloth streamers--a
sort of cat-o'-nine-tails effect, only with about a score or more of
tails. After herding the blue-bottles and all their kith and kin into a
fairly compact bunch at the door, little Annie opened the screen and
grandmother drove them out--and that's all there was to it.
Another favorite device (particularly in the dining-room and kitchen),
was the "fly-gallery"--a wonderful array of multicolored tissue-paper
festooned artistically from the ceiling or around the gas-pipes to lure
or induce the fly into moments of inactivity. There was no
extermination in this device--it was purely preventive in its
function--the idea being that since there must be fly-specks, better to
mass them as much as possible on places where they would show the least
and could be removed the easiest when sufficiently accumulated.
But the greatest ounce-of-prevention was the screen hemisphere. Gee! I
haven't thought of that thing for years, have you? Of course you
remember it--absolutely fly-proof--one clapped over the butter, another
over the crackerbowl, another over the sugar!
And say! I almost forgot! ... (Yes, I know you were just going to speak
of it!) ... That conical screen fly-trap where the flies see something
good inside, crawl up to the top and then over and in--and then can't
get out--but just buzz and buzz and buzz--and make a lot of fuss about
it--bluebottles and all--no respecter of persons--and when it gets full
of the quick and dead in flydom, Bridget takes it out in the back yard
and dumps it. Very simple ... clean, peaceful, effective.
My, My! But it's a far cry back to those days, isn't it? And wouldn't
you like right this minute to sneak into the cool, curtain-down,
ever-so-quiet dining-room again ... and nose around to see if anything
edible bad been overlooked--and see one of those dear old round
fly-screens guarding the sugar!