"TWIXT WALL AND BUSH. 89 
Forthwith, then, she crawled into the crack 
in the old wall, and was no more seen for a 
day or two, fasting the while from necessity. 
When at last she came out, you beheld her 
as a fine, fat, female garden spider, grayish, 
rotund, and forbidding, bearing upon her back 
the caste-mark of her species—a small white 
cross, that all might know (and many take 
warning from the knowledge) who she was. 
Then she began to work, and—ceased to be 
commonplace. 
From her spinnerets—where her tail should 
have been--she spun out a thread of silk, 
anchored it to the wall, and—fell like a dropped 
shot to the ground on it. 
Still carrying and paying out her silken line, 
she crawled to the bottom of a handy bush, 
meeting on her way an ant, whom she ran 
into, because apparently she was almost blind, 
or pretended to be, and nearly abolished. 
Next she climbed up the bush, ran into a 
greenfly on the way, slew it calmly, and 
having finished with the corpse, passed on to 
the end of a twig. Here she pulled in the 
slack of her line and made all fast. Thus she 
had a taut cable *twixt wall and bush. 
A bird interviewed her, and would have 
gobbled her up had she not dropped like a 
dead thing on another line half-way to the 
8.W. g 
