242 MESSALINA OF THE MESHES 



visitor's limbs relaxed, and his murderess, disposing her- 

 self luxuriously to the feast, proceeded to suck his juices 

 until his remains hung in the net a phantom of his former 

 nimble self. 



On many days after a similar tragedy was enacted, 

 until, when I visited the scene, the domestic apartment 

 presented the following appearance. At one angle of the 

 web lay this most dissolute of females, closely guarding 

 the fruit of her amours enclosed in three round brown 

 cocoons, while in her full view hung in different parts of 

 the net the withered corpses of no fewer than thirteen 

 husbands or paramours, all of whom had fallen victims 

 to her insatiate hunger. It was a truly sickening sight, 

 affording one more example of that most perplexing 

 fact — the absolute heartlessness of the scheme of Nature. 

 One object, and one alone, seems to be kept constantly 

 in view — namely, the perpetuation of the species. Let 

 that be secured, and all other considerations are thrown 

 to the winds. We human vertebrates have come to 

 regard life as a sacred thing, not to be wantonly wasted — 

 nay, as a thing to be reverently protected, and protracted 

 to its utmost span. But Nature, in ten thousand normal 

 instances, inculcates the doctrine that the life of the 

 individual is nothing — the endurance of an aggregate of 

 individuals everything. In the wonderful synopsis of 

 animated nature given in Psalm civ.. King David, who 

 never lost the true shepherd's eye for wild creatures, 

 notes not only the Creator's care to provide ' meat in due 

 season' for them, but also the stern indifference with 

 which He takes away their breath and allows them to 

 die and return to their dust. What chiefly strikes the 

 inquirer into the habits of the smaller and more multi- 



