190 LIFE AND HER CHILDREN. 
trust to seizing any small insects coming within her 
reach rather than to use the small stock of silk 
which cannot be replenished till she gets fresh food. 
You may perhaps wonder that all this time we 
have spoken of the spider as " she," but the truth is 
that the female spiders do most, if not all, of the 
work, for the male spiders are much smaller, and 
very rarely spin webs. They seem to live much at 
the expense of their wives, and, sad to relate, are 
very often killed by their spouses when these are 
tired of their company. 
And now, if the female spider succeeds in getting 
a living and escaping the birds and other enemies 
until the autumn, she spins a strong cocoon of 
yellow silk which she secures under some stone or 
into a crack in the wall, and though it measures 
scarcely half-an-inch across, yet she manages to pack 
into it from six to eight hundred eggs, and then 
leaves it ; and next spring, when the warm weather 
comes, the young spiders struggle out of the eggs, 
and working themselves free from the skin which 
hampers their limbs, cling together in a ball for 
about a month, and then separate and begin to spin 
webs as their mother did before them. They cast 
their skin many times before they are grown up, and 
even afterwards they creep out of it once a year and 
begin again with a fresh bright coat. 
From this garden spider we have learnt to know 
roughly the manner of life of the spinning spiders, 
and the tools with which they work ; but their 
devices for gaining a living, the nature of their webs, 
and the different nooks and corners they find for 
shelter, are almost endless. Look at the common 
