irregular globe surmounted by two horns, or antennae, as they are
called. The eyes most excited her curiosity. She attempted to count
their numerous little faces, so regular, so finely cut into
hexagons, more polished, more brilliant than diamonds. When
Piccolissima had counted one hundred, she drew from a very small
box, which was a family treasure, some minikin pins, and stuck one
of them into the cushion on which she was seated, intending thus to
mark every hundred that she counted; but she had not counted thus
half a thousand, before she found that breath and knowledge failed
her; in truth, she did not know enough of arithmetic to count the
eyes of a fly. In the very first group which she undertook to count,
that on the right side of the fly, she had not counted a sixteenth
part. Piccolissima, from her education, resembled the flies a little
too much to boast of her perseverance. So she gave up her project.

While bending her small head over these eyes, she distinguished, at
the bottom of these crystals, a moving dark spot, and thousands of
little Piccolissimas, one after the other, smiled upon her from
these little mirrors. O, wonderful! these thousands of crystal
groups on each side of the head were not all; a triangle of three
diamonds crowned the forehead of the fly. Piccolissima did not know
the name they give to these small eyes, nor that a writer on the
subject had said, that the diadem of the fly outshines that of
queens, but she could not refrain from saying aloud, "O, my little
friend, pray tell me what you do with so many eyes ?"

"What do I do with them, indeed! why, I look," answered the fly, a
little vexed at being disturbed in his repast. "Are there not
fingers, nails, pins, pincers, jaws, claws, beaks, which menace me
on every side? Do I not want eyes to see at a distance, and eyes to