208 HOME LIFE ON AN OSTRICH FARM. 



content with spoiling your appetite at meals by the 

 exhibition of his repulsive little black body in every 

 dish that comes to table, every cup of tea or glass 

 of wine that is poured out where, whether cooked to 

 death, or yet alive and struggling, it is an equally un- 

 welcome and disgusting sight he makes it his business 

 to see that throughout the whole day you do not, if he 

 can help it, get one instant's peace. No matter how 

 large the room may be, no place in it will suit him for 

 a perch but just your nose, or the hand which happens 

 to be busily engaged in some operation requiring 

 extreme steadiness, to which a jerk would be fatal ; 

 and however many times he is rebuffed, he comes back, 

 with the most unerring and fiendish precision, to exact- 

 ly the self-same spot, till he has set up a maddening 

 irritation, not only of the skin, but still more of the 

 temper. For he possesses, in the very strongest degree, 

 the quality which led those most observant of natural- 

 ists, the ancient Egyptians, to institute the military 

 order of the Fly. A good general, they argued, is like 

 a fly ; for, however often he may be repulsed, he always 

 returns persistently to the attack. So they invested 

 the successful leader of their armies with a gold chain, 

 from which, at intervals, hung several large flies of 

 pure, beaten gold, about four inches broad across the 

 closed wings. And in the Cairo Museum a very 

 beautiful chain of this kind is to be seen. 



That South African fly was, indeed, the torment of 

 our lives, until one day we made a grand discovery. 

 We found out that he could not stand Keating's insect- 



