SPIDERS AND THEIR RELATIVES 



Cholo, a fat little negro who liked to believe 

 and tell wonderful stories, was afraid of forest 

 ghosts and bullfrog hoodoos, but most of all he 

 was afraid of a certain pink scorpion he told me 

 about. These pink scorpions were found on 

 Barro Colorado, Cholo said, but he did not know 

 anybody who had ever seen one. The reason 

 was very simple. The pink scorpion was so 

 deadly that no one had ever seen him and lived 

 to tell the tale. Cholo could not ever tell me why 

 he knew they were pink, but he was as sure of 

 the color as he was of the scorpion. 



Of course we never saw this gaily colored and 

 frightful animal, but the story reminded me of 

 other tales I had heard when I was a boy. The 

 grown-up people I knew then were all afraid of 

 spiders, which were the nearest relatives to scor- 

 pions that Indiana could boast. They believed 

 that the bite of any spider was poisonous, and 

 they thought, too, that spiders would go out of 

 their way to bite people. This was an entirely 

 wrong idea that took me many years to correct 

 for myself. When we read lett-ers from friends in 

 Mexico who told of finding scorpions in their shoes 

 of mornings, we were sure that they had been in 

 great danger. 



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