dragon of your boyhood mince-pie dreams. The first two pages convince
you that the human race is doomed to extermination within eighteen
months by the housefly route!

Grandmother never resorted to very drastic measures. The most violent
thing she ever did was to get little Annie, Bridget-the-housewoman's
Annie, to help her chase them out. They went from room to room
periodically (when flies became too numerous), each armed with an old
sawed-off broom-handle on which were tacked long cloth streamers - a
sort of cat-o'-nine-tails effect, only with about a score or more of
tails. After herding the blue-bottles and all their kith and kin into a
fairly compact bunch at the door, little Annie opened the screen and
grandmother drove them out - and that's all there was to it.

Another favorite device (particularly in the dining-room and kitchen),
was the "fly-gallery" - a wonderful array of multicolored tissue-paper
festooned artistically from the ceiling or around the gas-pipes to lure
or induce the fly into moments of inactivity. There was no extermination
in this device - it was purely preventive in its function - the idea
being that since there must be fly-specks, better to mass them as much
as possible on places where they would show the least and could be
removed the easiest when sufficiently accumulated.

But the greatest ounce-of-prevention was the screen hemisphere. Gee! I
haven't thought of that thing for years, have you? Of course you
remember it - absolutely fly-proof - one clapped over the butter,
another over the crackerbowl, another over the sugar!

And say! I almost forgot! . . . (Yes, I know you were just going to
speak of it!) . . . That conical screen fly-trap where the flies see