HOW I BECAME AN IDLEE 19 



occupy my mind with other problems than that of 

 migration. These other problems, too, were in 

 many ways like the flies that shared my apart- 

 ment, and yet always remained strangers to me, 

 as I to them, since between their minds and mine 

 a great gulf was fixed. Small unpainful riddles 

 of the earth ; flitting, sylph-like things, that began 

 life as abstractions, and developed, like imago 

 from maggot, into entities: I always flitting 

 among them, as they performed their mazy dance, 

 whirling in circles, falling and rising, poised mo- 

 tionless, then suddenly cannoning against me for 

 an instant, mocking my power to grasp them, 

 and darting off again at a tangent. Baffled I 

 would drop out of the game, like a tired fly that 

 goes back to his perch, but like the resting, restive 

 fly I would soon turn towards them again; per- 

 haps to see them all wheeling in a closer order, 

 describing new fantastic figures, with swifter mo- 

 tions, their forms turned to thin black lines, cross- 

 ing and recrossing in every direction, as if they 

 had all combined to write a series of strange char- 

 acters in the air, all forming a strange sentence 

 the secret of secrets ! Happily for the progress 

 of knowledge only a very few of these fascinating 

 elusive insects of the brain can appear before us 

 at the same time: as a rule we fix our attention 

 on a single individual, like a falcon amid a flight 

 of pigeons or a countless army of small field 

 finches ; or a dragon-fly in the thick of a cloud of 

 mosquitoes, or infinitesimal sand-flies. Hawk and 



