Where do typhoon flies come from? We ask, like Rosa Dartle, ecause we really want to know. To the best of our knowledge and observation they are never seen at times of normal weather. Then, one night, we read in Siccawei's report that Yap and Guam are misbehaving themselves again. (Apparently their only cause for existence is to breed typhoons). Next morning the trees in the garden are violently agitated, there is breeze enough, but it has that hot, sticky feeling which wearies more than calm sun heat, and betokens the dregs of the atmosphere thrown up and scattered abroad by the convulsions of distant storm; and the sky is full of typhoon flies, swaying and eddying aimlessly in the reeking gusts. With the passing of the typhoon, they too pass—whither and why? In the height of the tempest itself one does not see them. They precede it, as far as we have been able to observe, by two or three days. Are they, then, only its servants and harbingers, resting] not at all but always ahead of it, like the lovers in Dante's vision, "going for ever on the accursed air"?
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.