How I became an Idler. \ 9 



migration. These other problems, too, were in 

 many ways like the flies that shared my apartment, 

 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 mag- 

 got, into entities : I always flitting among them, as 

 they performed their mazy dance, whirling in circles, 

 falling and rising, poised motionless, 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 ; perhaps to see them all wheeling in a 

 closer order, describing new fantastic figures, with 

 swifter motions, their forms turned to thin black 

 lines, crossing and recrossing in every direction, as 

 if they had all combined to write a series of strange 

 characters 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 mos- 

 quitoes, or infinitesimal sand-flies. Hawk and 

 dragon-fly would starve if they tried to capture, or 

 even regarded, more than one at a time. 



c 2 



