Spiders. 151 



mirabilis will defend his little ones. I suppose that is 

 why he is called mirabilis, for it is only too true that do- 

 mestic life among the araneicls is a tough proposition, as 

 a general thing. Mamma eats papa and little Dorothy 

 eats Harold, unless Marguerite catches him first. One 

 of the things that make the rare tract of Raymond Maria 

 de Termeyer on spider silk such delightful reading is his 

 horror at the cruelty and rapacity of the female. Poor 

 de Termeyer! He was at great pains to bring up a lot 

 of Diadcma spiders, fed them assiduously with flies 

 caught by his own hands, found out how to put a rig-a- 

 ma-jig across their bodies so as to keep them from cut- 

 ting off the thread with their hind legs, and invented a 

 reel so as to wind silk out of them by the hundred yards 

 at a time. He had his servant Lucrezia spin the silk 

 into stockings for his serene majesty Charles III., of 

 Spain, the first stockings ever made on this earth out of 

 spider's silk, and sent them to the king, and that was 

 the last he ever heard of them. The Count of Florida 

 Blanca said the king got them all right, but there never 

 was a ' Thank you " or " Aren't they nice? " or anything 

 of the kind. I fancy it must have been that the gift came 

 at an inopportune moment, when affairs of state were at 

 a critical point, say like this: ' Twenty-seven and a run 

 of three. Got you that time. Oh, look here! How 

 can you peg six? Where's your run of four? Well, but 

 that's only four and you pegged oh, yes. I see. Two 

 for the thirty-one. \Yhat is it, Florida Blanca? Oh, of 

 course you'd have a nine! I never saw such a man to 

 peg. Stockings, eh? Got more stockings now than I 

 know what to do with. Twenty-two and a pair. Oh, 

 you bet you'd have another one for a pair royal. It's a 

 go. Well, what do I care if they were made of spiders' 

 silk? It's a go, I said. Spiders' silk! The idea! Does 



