Swallowing a Fly

Country meeting-house. A midsummer Sabbath. The air lazy and I warm. The grave-yard around about oppressively still, the white slabs here and there shining in the light like the drifted snows of death, and not a grass - blade rustling as though a sleeper had stirred in his dream.

Clap -boards of the church weather-beaten, and very much boiled, either by humble - bees, or long sermons, probably the former, as the puncture was on the outside, instead of the in. Farmers, worn out with harvesting, excessively soothed by the services into dreaming of the good time coming, when wheat shall be worth

twice as much to the bushel, and a basket of

SWALLOW/iVG A FLY. 313

fresh - laid eggs will buy a Sunday jacket for a boy.

We had come to the middle of our sermon, when a large fly, taking advantage of the opened mouth of the speaker, darted into our throat. The crisis was upon us. Shall we cough and eject this impertinent intruder, or let him silently have his way? We had no precedent to guide us. We knew not what the fathers of the church did in like circumstances, or the mothers either. We are not informed that Chrysostom ever turned himself into a fly-trap. We knew not what the Synod of Dort would have said to a minister’s eating flies durincr reliofious services.

We saw the unfairness of taking advantage of a fly in such straitened circumstances. It may have been a blind fly, and not have known where it was going. It may have been a scientific fly, and only experimenting with air currents. It may have been a reckless fly, doing what he soon would be sorry for, or a young fly, and gone a-sailing on Sunday without his mother’s consent.

Beside this, we are not fond of flies prepared in that way. We have, no doubt, often taken them preserved in blackberry jam, or, in the poorly lighted eating - house, taken them done up in Stewart’s sirup. But fly in the raw was a diet from which we recoiled. We would have preferred it roasted, or fried, or panned, or baked, and then to have chosen our favorite part, the upper joint, and a little of the breast, if you please, sir. But, no; it was wings, proboscis, feet, poisers, and alimentary canal. There was no choice; it was all, or none.

We foresaw the excitement and disturbance we would make, and the probability of losing our thread of discourse, if we undertook a series of coughs, chokings, and expectorations, and that, after all our efforts, we might be unsuccessful, and end the affray with a fly’s wing on our lip, and a leg in the windpipe, and the most unsavory part of it all under the toneue.

We concluded to take down the nuisance. We rallied all our energies. It was the most animated passage in all our discourse. We were not at all hungry for anything, much less for such hastily prepared viands. We found

It no easy job. The fly evidently wanted to back out. “No!” we said within ourselves. “Too late to retreat. You are In for It now!” We addressed It In the words of Noah to the orang - outang, as It was about entering the Ark, and lingered too long at the door, “Go In, sir — go In!”

And so we conquered, giving a warning to flies and men that it is easier to get into trouble than to get out again. We have never mentioned the above circumstance before; we felt it a delicate subject. But all the fly’s friends are dead, and we can slander It as much as we please, and there Is no danger now. We have had the thing on our mind ever since we had It on our stomach, and so we come to this confessional.

You acknowledge that we did the wisest thing that could be done; and yet how many people spend their time in elaborate, and long-continued, and convulsive ejection of flies which they ought to swallow and have done with.

Your husband’s thoughtlessness Is an exceeding annoyance. He is a good man, no better husband since Adam gave up a spare rib as a nucleus around which to gather a woman. But he is careless about where he throws his slippers. On the top of one of your best parlor books he has laid a plug of pig - tail tobacco. For fifteen years you have lectured him about leaving the newspaper on the floor. Do not let such little things interfere with your domestic peace. Better swallow the fly, and have done with it.

Here is a critic, to you a perpetual annoyance. He has no great capacity himself, but he keeps up a constant buzzing. You write a book, he caricatures it. You make a speech, he sneers at it. You never open your mouth but he flies into it. You have used up a magazine of powder in trying to curtail the sphere of that insect. You chased him around the corner of a Quarterly Review. You hounded him out from the cellar of a newspaper. You stop the urgent work of life to catch one poor fly — the Cincinnati Express train stopping at midnight to send a brakeman ahead with flag and lantern to scare the mosquitos off the track; a “Swamp - Angel” out a-gunning for rats.

It never pays to hunt a fly. You clutch at him. You sweep your hand convulsively through the air. You wait till he alights on your face, and then give a fierce slap on the place where he was. You slyly wait till he crawls up your sleeve, and then give a violent crush to the folds of your coat, to find out that it was a different fly from the one you were searching after. That one sits laughing at your vexation from the tip of your nose.

Apothecaries advertise insect-exterminators; but if in summer-time we set a glass to catch flies, for every one we kill there are twelve coroners called to sit as jury of inquest; and no sooner does one disappear under our fell pursuit, than all its brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, and second cousins come out to see what in the world is the matter. So with the unclean critics that crawl over an author’s head. You cannot destroy them with bludgeons. There is a time in a schoolboy’s history when a fine-tooth comb will give him more

relief than a whole park of artillery. O man! go on with your life - work! If, opening your mouth to say the thing that ought to be said, a fly dart in, swallow it!

The current of your happiness is often choked up by trifles. Your chimney smokes. Through the thick vapor you see no blessing left. You feel that with the right kind of a chimney you could be happy. It would be worse if you had no chimney at all, and still worse if you had no fire. Household annoyances multiply the martyrs of the kitchen. The want of more pantry room, the need of an additional closet, the smallness of the breadtray, the defectiveness of the range, the lack of draught in a furnace, a crack in the saucepan, are flies in the throat. Open your mouth, shut your eyes, and gulp down the annoyances.

The aforesaid fly, of whose demise I spoke, was digested, and turned into muscle and bone, and went to preaching himself Vexations conquered become additional strength. We would all be rich in disposition, if we learned to tax for our benefit the things that stick and scratch. We ought to collect a tariff on needles and pins. The flower struck of the tempest, catches the drop that made it tremble, and turns the water Into wine. The battle In, and the victory dependent on your next sabrestroke, throw not your armor down to shake a gravel from your shoe. The blue fly oi despondency has choked to death many a giant.

Had we stopped on the aforesaid day to kill the Insect, at the same time we would have killed our sermon. We could not waste our time on such a combat. Truth ouorht not to be wrecked on an Insect’s proboscis. You are all ordained to some mission by the laying on of the hard hands of work, the white hands of joy, and the black hands of trouble. Whethei your pulpit be blacksmith’s anvil, or carpenter’s bench, or merchant’s counter, do not stop for a fly.

Our every life Is a sermon. Our birth Is the text from which we start. Youth is the Introduction to the discourse. Durinor our manhood we lay down a few propositions and prove them. Some of the passages are dull, and some sprightly. Then come Inferences and applications. At seventy years we say “Fifthly and Lastly.” The Doxology is sung. The Benediction is pronounced. The Book closed. It is getting cold. Frost on the window-pane. Audience gone. Shut up the church. Sexton goes home with the key on his shoulder.