196 LIFE AND HER CHILDREN. 
It is worth some trouble to find this wonderful 
little creature, which has often been seen in the fens 
of Cambridgeshire, and in the ditches near Oxford, 
and also in Ireland, and which, though fitted to 
breathe in the air, has learnt to take refuge in the 
water, and find there her food and her home. She 
fixes her house on the stem of some water-plant, 
spinning there a thimble of delicate silk into which she 
carries air, shaken off as bubbles from her body; and 
this air rising up to the top of the thimble gradually 
displaces the water and fills the whole chamber. 
And so in peaceful but not entirely stagnant water, 
On light sprays hung, 
By silk cords slung, 
O'er-arched by a silken dome, 
Is the airy hall 
With waterproof wall 
Where the spider makes her home, 
and there she lives quite dry, and spins her silken 
cocoon with its hundred eggs, out of which come 
the young spiders which begin at once to build 
and live as she does. Even when she makes her 
journeys to the surface to catch water-flies and 
other insects, or to take breath, the water does not 
wet her, for the bubbles of air which glisten over 
her body, making it shine like quicksilver, keep her 
skin dry. 
And here we must take leave of the true spiders, 
which roam all over the world, and range in size from 
the huge hunting spiders of South America and 
Ceylon, whose legs will cover a foot of ground, and 
who have been seen to prey upon young birds and 
lizards, to the tiny red money-spinner, which is so 
