LITTLE PEOPLE OF THE OUT-DOOR WORLD 575 



to be confined to any special breed of animals. There 

 is a common little fellow known as the gossamer spider. 

 He is an aeronaut by profession, and makes himself a 

 tailless kite of a bunch of his own web, attaches to it a 

 string of the same material, then as the zephyr catches 

 the gossamer kite, the little aeronaut lets go all hold of 

 the earth and sails aloft. All of us have brushed these 

 webs from our faces and many of us wondered how they 

 came to be stretched across the paths and sidewalks. 



In May, 1890, an odd fog bank a thousand or more 

 feet long and several feet thick was observed in Cali- 

 fornia. When this phenomenon slowly settled upon 

 the earth the wonder-stricken spectators were horrified 

 to discover that it contained millions and millions of 

 spiders. It was a mighty migration of gossamer 

 spiders. 



From my studio window on Fifth avenue, in New 

 York city, I have seen a cloud of the black and red milk- 

 weed butterflies passing over the city. I have seen the 

 same thing in St. Louis and also from the top of the 

 Mercantile National Bank, on lower Broadway. In 

 1889 a butterfly storm swept over Carson, Nev. From 

 the printed description of the insects they appear to have 

 been the imported European butterfly (Vanessa anti- 

 opa). 



A large cloud of minute butterflies visited parts of 

 California in the same year, and similar phenomena are 

 reported from Canada and abroad, but storms of butter- 

 flies will frighten nothing except horses and farmers. 

 A cloud of wasps or bees, however, will stampede al- 

 most any living thing. 



