A similar story is told in the Lives of the Saints, of St. Felix of Nola: “But the Saint,” says Butler, “in the mean time had slept a little out of the way, and crept through a
hole in a ruinous old wall, which was instantly closed up by Spiders’ webs. His enemies, never imagining anything could have lately passed where they saw so close a Spider’s web, after a fruitless search elsewhere, returned in the evening without their prey. Felix finding among the ruins, between two houses, an old well half dry, hid himself in it for six months; and received during that time wherewithal to subsist by means of a devout Christian woman.”[1130]
It is said of Heliogabalus, that, for the purpose of estimating the magnitude of the City of Rome, he commanded a collection of Spiders to be made.[1131]
Illustrative of the singularly pleasurable effect of music upon Spiders, in the Historie de la Musique, et de ses Effets, we find the following relation:
“Monsieur de ——, captain of the Regiment of Navarre, was confined six months in prison for having spoken too freely of M. de Louvois, when he begged leave of the governor to grant him permission to send for his lute to soften his confinement. He was greatly astonished after four days to see at the time of his playing the mice come out of their holes, and the Spiders descend from their webs, who came and formed in a circle round him to hear him with attention. This at first so much surprised him, that he stood still without motion, when having ceased to play, all those Spiders retired quietly into their lodgings; such an assembly made the officer fall into reflections upon what the ancients had told of Orpheus, Arion, and Amphion. He assured me he remained six days without again playing, having with difficulty recovered from his astonishment, not to mention a natural aversion he had for this sort of insects, nevertheless he began afresh to give a concert to these animals, who seemed to come every day in greater numbers, as if they had invited others, so that in process of time he found a hundred of them about him. In order to rid himself of them he desired one of the jailors to give him a cat, which he sometimes shut up in a cage when he wished to have this company and let her loose when he had a mind to dismiss them, making it thus a kind of comedy that alleviated his imprisonment. I long doubted the truth of this story, but it was confirmed to me six months ago by M. P——, intendant
of the duchy of V——, a man of merit and probity, who played upon several instruments to the utmost excellence. He told me that being at ——, he went into his chamber to refresh himself after a walk, and took up a violin to amuse himself till supper time, setting a light upon the table before him; he had not played a quarter of an hour before he saw several spiders descend from the ceiling, who came and ranged themselves round about the table to hear him play, at which he was greatly surprised, but this did not interrupt him, being willing to see the end of so singular an occurrence. They remained on the table very attentively till somebody came to tell him that supper was ready, when having ceased to play, he told me these insects remounted to their webs, to which he would suffer no injury to be done. It was a diversion with which he often entertained himself out of curiosity.”[1132]
The Abbé Olivet has described an amusement of Pelisson during his confinement in the Bastile for refusing to betray to the government certain secrets intrusted to him by a friend who was a leading politician at the court of Louis XIV., which consisted in feeding a Spider, which he discovered forming its web across the only air-hole of his cell. For some time he placed his flies at the edge of the window, while a stupid Basque, his sole companion, played on a bagpipe. Little by little the Spider used itself to distinguish the sound of the instrument, and issued from its hole to run and catch its prey. Thus calling it always by the same sound, and placing the flies at a still greater distance, he succeeded, after several months, to drill the Spider by regular exercise, so that at length it never failed appearing at the first sound to seize on the fly provided for it, at the extremity of the cell, and even on the knees of the prisoner.[1133]
At a ladies’ school at Kensington, England, an immense species of Spider is said to be uncomfortably common; and that when the young ladies sing their accustomed hymn or psalm before morning and evening prayers, these Spiders make their appearance on the floor, or suspended overhead from their webs in the ceiling, obviously attracted by the “concord of sweet sounds.”[1134]
The following lines “to a Spider which inhabited a cell,” are from the Anthologia Borealis et Australis:
In this wild, groping, dark, and drearie cove,