Perhaps before rain they are most hungry, and therefore, to asswage their hunger, do more diligently seek after their food. This also is to be observed, that a little before a showre or a storme comes, the Flies descend from the upper region of the air to the lowest, and do fly, as it were, on the very surface of the earth. Moreover, if you see them very busie about sweet-meats or unguents, you may know that it will presently be a showre. But if they be in all places many and numerous, and shall so continue long (if Alexander Benedict and Johannes Damascenus say true), they foretell a plague or pestilence, because so many of them could not be bred of a little putrefaction of the air.”[979] Elsewhere Moufet states: “Neither are Flies begotten of dung only, but of any other filthy matter putrefied by heat in the summer time, and after the same way spoken of before, as Grapaldus and Lonicerus have very well noted.”[980] Willsford, in his Nature’s Secrets, p. 135, says: “Flies in the spring or summer season, if they grow busier or blinder than at other times, or that they are observed to shroud themselves in warm places, expect then quickly to follow either hail, cold storms of rain, or very much wet weather; and if these little creatures are noted early in autumn to repair into their winter quarters, it presages frosty mornings, cold storms, with the approach of hoary winter. Atomes of Flies swarming together, and sporting themselves in the sunbeams, is a good omen of fair weather.”[981] In Gayton’s Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot, 1654, p. 99, speaking of Sancho Panza’s having converted a cassock into a wallet, our pleasant annotator observes: “It was serviceable, after this greasie use, for nothing but to preach at a carnivale or Shrove Tuesday, and to tosse Pancakes in after the exercise; or else, if it could have been conveighed thither, nothing more proper for a man that preaches the Cook’s sermon at Oxford, when that plump society rides upon their governour’s horses to fetch in the Enemie, the Flie.” That there was such a custom at Oxford, let Peshall, in his history of that city, be a voucher, who, speaking of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, p. 280, says: “To this Hospital cooks from Oxford flocked, bringing in on Whitsun-week the Fly.” Aubrey saw this ceremony performed in 1642. He adds: “On Michaelmas-day, they rode thither again to carry the Fly away.”[982] Plutarch, in his disquisition on the Art of Discerning a Flatterer from a Friend, makes the following curious comparison: “The Gad-Flie (as they say) which useth to plague bulles and oxen, setteth about their eares, and so doth the tick deal by dogges: after the same manner, flatterers take hold of ambitious mens eares, and possesse them with praises; and being once set fast there, hardly are they to be removed and chased away.”[983] Plautus twice compares envious and inquisitive persons to Flies.[984]