Stray Leaves from a Border Garden 
That dwarfe is a fell Ettercap, 
And liven aye on nettlesap, 
And hath none other fode. 
Ritson was a vegetarian, and had written spitefully 
about Leyden’s friend, George Ellis, of “ Early Metrical 
Romance” fame, and Leyden resented this, and while 
abusing Ritson thus, gives in this fragment a pleasant 
description of my kinsman as that “ Squyere hizt Ellis 
with his eyen grey as glasse, and his Fairy Dame ” — Mrs. 
Ellis being a very little woman. Here the village children 
greet a red spider with this verse : 
Redcoat, redcoat, fly away, 
Gie us to-morrow a bonny die. 
“ A bonny die ” is a little present. 
In Devon there is a saying, a red spider is a money 
spider, and brings wealth to some one ; the person who first 
sees it, I suppose. I told this to a little Scots lassie, and 
she pondered thereon awhile, and then remembered 
solemnly how it was certainly after seeing a red spider one 
day a luck penny had come her way ! I need scarcely add 
she had further cause to believe in it. There is a dislike 
to kill a spider in Scotland, especially on the part of a 
Bruce, for the sake of the good turn done to The Bruce by 
a spider. 
How pretty the Italian name for gossamer spider’s web is — 
Filamenti di S. Maria! The Scotch term is “mooseweb” or 
“ mouseweb,” from the old Teutonic mos, meaning moisture. 
In the West Indies spiders bear a bad character, yet it is 
deemed unlucky to kill them, especially the big ones called 
Anansi. “ Anansi ” means “ evil spirit,” and I think comes 
from a West African term ananisem, to spin. Spiders used to 
be put into old-time medicines : a spider in a nutshell hung 
round the neck was deemed a cure for fever. Longfellow 
alludes to this as a fancy among the Acadian peasantry. 
My old Herbal is full of quaint recipes against the 
“ poysonous bitings of Spideres ” ; indeed, to read this old 
Queen Anne book, one would imagine English spiders were 
26 
