IG TENANTS OF AN OLD FARM. 



You do not believe, perhaps, in tlie sudden birtli of a 

 soul into a new passion, or its sudden palingenesis — its 

 i-ebirth — into an old love and life ? Nevertheless, as I 

 kneeled in the grass before that web of silken threads, 

 brought out in detail against the background of a black 

 slouch hat held behind it, the old passion came back as 

 with a Ijound, and seated itself in my heart. Mam^ 

 years before this, during a brief enforced idleness, in a 

 moment like the present, when the body was drifting 

 deviously before an aimless wind, a similar vision had 

 awakened, as by a new birth, the first special love of a 

 naturalist. Memory now recalled vividly the whole 

 outward details of that scene, indeed my very thoughts 

 and feelings. "Was it merely a trick of mental associa- 

 tion? "When forests of black-jack oak succeed burned 

 pines on a Jersey barren, and chestnut groves follow a 

 spruce-clearing in the Alleghanies, botanists suggest 

 that it is simply a return to an earlier state, permitted 

 by a removal of the restraining conditions. Do old 

 mental moods, long buried under other courses ot 

 thought and emotion, spring up in full foi-ce again when 

 overlying habits are set aside ? But this is a digression 

 into the field of philosophy. "We return to our meadow 

 and the Bank Argiope. 



She is among the most beautiful of our native spiders, 

 and is our largest species of orbweavers, Avitli the ex- 

 ception of the Plumefoot Nephila {NepliUa phmiipes) of 

 the far Southern states. She is quite continental in her 

 lialiitat, as I have traced her westward through 

 Michigan. lUinois, Wisconsin, Neltraska, Id tlu' llocky 



