The secretary of the most charming holiday golf links that
I know receives many compliments and one complaint, endlessly repeated. Everything is lovely except the flies. At some of the tees they are often—to use the phrase of an old country gardener of the Midlands—" wonderful terrifying." You see a man just about to drive suddenly repent, seize his hat and strike the air rapidly and passionately. His feelings, almost his words, may be inferred with some accuracy, though vocabularies differ, even at a considerable distance. Now the flies are doubtless bred in quantity among the fir trees and bracken that compose the hinterland of these invaded tees and greens ; and no preventive remedies yet discovered are likely to be sovereign ; but it remains that the flies are abetted rather than hindered. There is no breeding ground for their eggs that flies prefer to a heap of cut grass. It ferments to the ideal heat and the tissue is congenial. Along the edge of the much abused wood grass from the greens was left in heaps yeasty with the progeny of the flies. It is a sight very common in private gardens ; and if you want to discover the base from which flies issue you will Often find it in that hidden place where gardeners tip their rubbish before burning it or converting it into manure by the aid of Atco, that most useful chemical mixture discovered at Rothamsted. But none of his rubbish is so fully appreciated by flies as the heap of finely cut grass.
W. BEACH THOMAS.
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