THE SPIDERS. 87 



ought to refrain from giving reasons for it. Those who do 

 such things do not generally proceed upon reason. I enter 

 into an alliance, offensive and defensive, with spiders, and 

 they fight my battles and slay my enemies for me. They 

 entangle the mosquito swarms, entrap the droning beetle 

 in full sail for my lamp, plot against the pestilent fly, and 

 garrotte the cricket. Caucasian Insect Powder is cold com- 

 fort. When your enemy falls into the toils of a blood- 

 thirsty spider, and is being bound hand and foot for execu- 

 tion, "there's retribution in the deed," and you feel that 

 you are in some sort indemnified for all you have suffered. 

 What would I do without spiders ? That they are not 

 prepossessing in their appearance, and fascinating in their 

 ways, is in harmony with a great law of the universe. " A 

 man may smile and smile and be a villain," but in nature 

 there is invariably a certain correspondence between the 

 outward and the inward, between the aspect of a thing and 

 the part which it has to play in the world ; everything is 

 dressed as becomes its vocation. And it is in accordance 

 with the eternal fitness of things that the spider should be, 

 as to its outward appearance, sinister and forbidding. If 

 it could look gentle and engaging as it strangled a fly, my 

 soul would revolt against the hypocrisy of the thing ; but 



