I knew the nervous ones, the phlegmatic ones. There was a little
undersized one that would fly into real rages, sometimes with me,
sometimes with its fellows. Have you ever seen a colt or a calf throw up
its heels and dash madly about the pasture from sheer excess of vitality
and spirits? Well, there was one fly--the keenest player of them all, by
the way--who, when it had alighted three or four times in rapid
succession on my taboo wall and succeeded each time in eluding the velvet-
careful swoop of my hand, would grow so excited and jubilant that it
would dart around and around my head at top speed, wheeling, veering,
reversing, and always keeping within the limits of the narrow circle in
which it celebrated its triumph over me.

Why, I could tell well in advance when any particular fly was making up
its mind to begin to play. There are a thousand details in this one
matter alone that I shall not bore you with, although these details did
serve to keep me from being bored too utterly during that first period in
solitary. But one thing I must tell you. To me it is most memorable--the
time when the one with a grouch, who never played, alighted in a moment
of absent-mindedness within the taboo precinct and was immediately
captured in my hand. Do you know, he sulked for an hour afterward.

And the hours were very long in solitary; nor could I sleep them all
away; nor could I while them away with house-flies, no matter how
intelligent. For house-flies are house-flies, and I was a man, with a
man's brain; and my brain was trained and active, stuffed with culture
and science, and always geared to a high tension of eagerness to do. And
there was nothing to do, and my thoughts ran abominably on in vain
speculations. There was my pentose and methyl-pentose determination in
grapes and wines to which I had devoted my last summer vacation at the
Asti Vineyards. I had all but completed the series of experiments. Was