A COUPLE OF SPIDERS. 
207 
my pillow. After a couple of days I found her with a perfectly 
correct web in a corner of my library, where she was not likely 
to meet with more than two flies a year. She was thin, and 
doubtless hankered after the flesh-pots of Egypt, though deter- 
mined not to return to bondage. 
Before this, 1 had discovered a radical defect in my regime. 
1 had never seen spiders drinking, and must have had some 
vague idea of the blood of their victims sufficing. Fortunately 
for my captive I was always trying some e.xperiment or other on 
her; she did not acknowledge it, but this curiosity was a blessing 
in disguise. At any rate, one day I squirted a little jet of water 
at her from a pipette, just to see what she would do. To my 
surprise she lowered herself down to the pool on the floor of the 
box and gulped it up with spasmodic eagerness. I apologised 
handsomely for my ignorant neglect, and thenceforward she had 
a good suck at the pipette every day; never, however, without 
trying to spin up for good and all the source of the beneficent 
supply. She never learned to discriminate between movement 
and life, and to her dying day was always ready with a fruitless 
web for glass pipettes and buzzing tuning-forks. I suppose in 
their native state the beads of dew and rain on their webs give 
them enough to drink; but even there they never say no to a 
friendly invitation to “take a drop” from the end of a straw. 
I often amused myself by putting strange creatures into her web, 
such as ants and garden-bugs. In Italy I have seen the most 
interesting encounters between ants and spiders, not always to 
the disadvantage of the former. For instance, one large black 
ant whom I had introduced into a web got so enraged that he 
walked literally into the spider’s parlour, turned out the occu- 
pant, and dragged out his whole store of flies, some four or five 
in number. I never could find an ant big enough to incommode 
my pet, but snails were a great puzzle both to her and to them- 
selves. The fluid ejected by a distressed garden-bug has a 
peculiar chemical effect upon the web in which he is being spun 
up, and moreover is decidedly unpleasant in taste to the spider, 
as the latter makes evident by going to the wall and rubbing on 
it her widely open jaws. The same effect is produced by the 
innocent looking aphis. It is a curious illustration of the pro- 
verb, “ One man's meat is another man’s poison,” that the 
milch-cow of the ant should be the bugbear of the spider. 
Before very long my spider lost her appetite and grew to an 
unwieldy size ; the web also lost its stickiness. I knew that these 
signs meant an impending nest, and had great hopes of a brood 
of pets to come. Sure enough the nest appeared one morning in 
all its completeness, a marvellous work for a single night ; I had 
expected her to take a week over the building of it. I pulled one 
to pieces and found that, inside the rough outer web, the com- 
pact cone of eggs was wrapped up in a coating formed by a con- 
tinuous silky thread apparently about a hundred yards in length. 
It is an exquisitely soft material, and bore unwinding to its full 
