The Garden Spiders: The Lime-Snare 



The sight is perfectly astounding. Those 

 threads, on the borderland between the visible 

 and the invisible, are very closely twisted 

 twine, similar to the gold cord of our officers' 

 sword-knots. Moreover, they are hollow. 

 The infinitely slender is a tube, a channel full 

 of a viscous moisture resembling a strong 

 solution of gum arabic. I can see a diapha- 

 nous trail of this moisture trickling through 

 the broken ends. Under the pressure of the 

 thin glass slide that covers them on the stage 

 of the microscope, the twists lengthen out, 

 become crinkled ribbons, traversed from end 

 to end, through the middle, by a dark streak, 

 which is the empty container. 



The fluid contents must ooze slowly 

 through the side of those tubular threads, 

 rolled into twisted strings, and thus render 

 the network sticky. It is sticky, in fact, and 

 in such a way as to provoke surprise. I bring 

 a fine straw flat down upon three or four 

 rungs of a sector. However gentle the con- 

 tact, adhesion is at once established. When I 

 lift the straw, the threads come with it and 

 stretch to twice or three times their length, 

 like a thread of India-rubber. At last, when 

 over-taut, they loosen without breaking and 



273 



