58 IN THE ACADIAN LAND. 



roadside was not done with an eye to beauty ; 

 there was no thought about the gentle dew 

 adorning them with jewels; no consideration 

 that the sunbeams would be wrecked in their 

 pendant pearls, and a human eye would be there 

 to enjoy the spectacle. Quite otherwise: every 

 net had been made for the special purpose of 

 entangling some living thing. As a rule, only 

 the female spiders can make webs. The males 

 are smaller, slimmer, and prowl around the webs 

 of species smaller than their own kind, and rob 

 them. When pressed by hunger they will vent- 

 ure a combat with a female of their species, for 

 the sake of a meal on a captured fly. Not very 

 long ago I witnessed an encounter of that kind. 

 The female, one of the wheel-making kind, a 

 strong, active thing, that would more than cover 

 a copper cent, had made a fine trap between 

 two bits of a timber of a bridge. It was about 

 a foot across. She sat in the centre, with each 

 foot grasping a spoke and thus able to quickly 

 feel any disturbance, and ready to run toward 

 the point where a fly would be caught. The 

 twilight was over all, and spider-life was becom- 

 ing very active. A large male spider that had 

 been in hiding near the fly-trap of his relative 

 one of the same species ran quickly out on 

 the edge of the web, seized a thread of it and 



