Bladder Traps I.
"What am I to say?" replied the flower. "These are hard times. There are a great many of us, and the earth is quite exhausted. So I hit upon this and it goes swimmingly. But then I have got my apparatus just right. Would you like to see it?"
"Very much," said the spider. "But you won't hurt me, will you?"
"Be easy," said the bladder-wort, with a laugh. "You're too big for me. Run along one of my stalks and I'll explain the whole thing to you."
The spider crept cautiously for some way down the branch and then stopped and looked at a little bladder there.
"That's tight," said the bladder-wort. "That is one of my traps. I catch my prey in them. I have a couple of hundred of them."
"So you can eat two hundred water-mites at a time?" said the spider, enviously.
"I can. If they come. But I'm never so jolly lucky as all that. Now just look: beside the bladder you will see a little flap, which is quite loose. When some fool or other knocks up against it, it goes in and—slap, dash!—the fool tumbles into the bladder. He can't get out; and then I eat him at my leisure."
"Do you hear?" whispered Mrs. Reed-Warbler.