"I was coming--I have just come to them," I reply with dignity. I am a professor and have a certain stock supply of dignity to draw on when necessary. It isn't often necessary with Mary. "Well, as I came from the covered _Mühlenbrücke_ and out on to the lake-shore promenade, I saw a little crowd of people gathered under and about a brilliant arclight hanging in an open place in front of the great Schweizerhof Hotel. The light seemed to me curiously hazy, and even before I got near the crowd I had made a guess at what was going on. My guess that it was a May-fly dance of death was quite right. Perhaps it would really be better to call it a 'dance of life,' for it really was sort of a great wedding dance. But it was a dance of death, too, for the dancers were falling dead or dying out of the dizzying whirly circles by thousands. How many hundreds or thousands or millions of May-flies there were in the dense circling cloud about the light, I have no idea. But the air for twenty feet every way from the light was full of them, and the ground for a circle of thirty or forty feet underneath was not merely covered with the delicate dead creatures, but was covered for from one to two inches deep! "The crowd of promenaders looked on in gaping wonder. Not one seemed to know what kind of creature this was, nor of course anything about what was really going on; that this was all of the few hours of feverish life which these May-flies enjoyed in their winged state, and that they gave it all up to the business of mating and egg-laying; where they came from, how they had lived before, why they should be here to-night and no other in the whole year, all these things which it seems to me the onlookers ought to have wanted to know, nobody seemed to know, nor anybody seemed particularly to care to. "But there are places in the world where the people do want to know these things, and a great many more, about the May-flies. One such place is the Thousand Islands in the St. Lawrence River. One day I was sailing down this river among the Thousand Islands, and the acquaintanceship of a small and unusually delicate kind of May-fly was forced on me by the hundreds of them that persisted in alighting on my clothes, my hat, and my hair. They kept walking unsteadily about over my face and hands and the open pages of the book I was trying to read. And they kept dying, dying, all around. One would light on the outer edge of the page, and before it had walked across to the beginning of a sentence, it would die and its body would slide gently down into the back of the book and--be a bookmarker!" "That's not a very nice way to talk about the poor little dead May-flies," said Mary, rather seriously. "It isn't, Mary, I know," said I. "But we've got to relieve the gloom of this tale someway, don't you think? There is too much wholesale death in it to suit my publisher! And so I am trying to introduce a little jocularity into it, don't you see, Mary?"