How T became an Idler. 19 
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 
