ne of us. She was quite cracked, into the bargain, and
must have been born with a glass of absinthe in her stomach, which her
mother drank at the moment she was being delivered, and she never got
sober since, for her wet nurse, so she said, recruited her strength with
draughts of rum, and she never called the bottles which were standing in
a line at the back of the wine merchant's shop anything but 'My holy
family.'

"I do not know which of us gave her the name of _Fly_, nor why it was
given her, but it suited her very well, and stuck to her, and our yawl
every week carried five merry, strong young fellows on the Seine between
Asnieres and Maison Lafitte, who were ruled from under a parasol of
colored paper, by a lively and madcap young person, who treated us like
slaves whose business it was to row her about, and whom we were all very
fond of.

"We were all very fond of her, for a thousand reasons first of all, but
for only one, afterwards. In the stern of our boat, she was a kind of
small word mill, chattering to the wind which blew on the water. She
chattered ceaselessly, with that slight, continuous noise of those
pieces of winged mechanism which turn in the breeze, and she
thoughtlessly said the most unexpected, the funniest, the most
astonishing things. In that mind, all the parts of which seemed
dissimilar, like rags of all kinds and of every color, not sewn, but
merely tacked together, there appeared to be as much imagination as in
a fairy tale, a good deal of coarseness, indecency, impudence and of the
unexpected, and as much breeziness and landscapes as in a balloon
voyage.

"We put questions to her, in order to call forth answers which she had
found, no one could tell where, and the one with which we teased her
most frequently was: 'Why are you called Fly?' And she gave us such
unlikely reasons that we left off rowing, in order to laugh. But she
pleased us also as a woman; and La Toque, who never rowed, and who sat
by her side at the tiller the whole day long, once replied to the usual
question: 'Why are you called Fly?' 'Because she is a little Spanish
fly.'

"Yes, a little buzzing, exciting fly, not the classical, poisonous,
brilliant and mantled Spanish fly, but a little Spanish fly with red
wings, which began to disturb the whole crew of _The Leaf Turned Upside
Down_. And what stupid jokes were also made about this leaf where this
fly had alighted!

"Since the arrival of Fly on our boat, Only-One-E