SPIDERS AND WILD BEASTS. 281 



one* forms or finds its ambush in a rolled-up leaf; another t 

 lurks behind a stone or the gaping bark of an old tree; a 

 third J (as a tiger in his jungle) sits embowered in the thick 

 panicle of a reed ; while a fourth, ensconced, as at bottom of a 

 pit, in the calyx of a dead flower, sits prepared to pounce upon 

 the first unwary fly happening to visit it in search of honey. 

 Besides these, the sweet white blossoms of the hawthorn, and 

 the blossoms white (not sweet) of many umbelliferous plants, 

 conceal, squatted within their corollas, and therefrom hardly 

 distinguishable, a host of white assassins lying in wait to select 

 their victims from amongst the many-coloured resorters to their 

 dangerous neighbourhood. 



If the more wary roamers of the forest and the desert have 

 thus their insect images amongst spider " Vagrants" the more 

 daring have resemblances as apt in the bolder "Hunters" 

 such as spring openly on their prey, and, after destroying, 

 carry it for devourment to their dens. On a flowering shrub 

 sits an enormous hairy-leg of this description, on the look-out, 

 we may be sure, for game : perhaps a swollen blue-bottle, a 

 fat drone bee, or an overgrown crane-fly ? No ; he aims, or we 

 may almost say he flies, at a higher quarry at a living prey, 

 lustrous as a gem, swift as the lightning; as it darts from 

 flower to flower, too rapid on the wing for human sight to 

 follow, yet not so rapid as to elude the eight-eyed vision of the 

 monster which has marked it for destruction not so rapid as 



% 



* Clubiona holosericum. f C. atrox. \ Aranea arundinacea. 



