“‘THE MOTHER SPINS THE COCOON OF SILK FROM HER OWN BODY’”
“The flower spiders are not web spinners either,” went on Madame Spider, who seemed to like nothing better than to talk. “They live among flowers, and eat the visiting insects. You can see some of them over there. Talk about colours! They are gay enough, just like flowers themselves. Perhaps you can guess why.”
Ruth thought a few minutes.
“Well,” she said, “if they were the same colour as the flower they couldn’t be seen so easily. I saw something walk out of an ear of corn once, and it looked like a kernel of corn on eight legs. It was awful funny. Was that a spider?”
“Very likely. We are wonderful enough for anything. I suppose you have never heard of the trapdoor spider and his silk-lined burrow, with its little hinged door, nor of the spider who lives under the water, in a tiny silken house, which she spins herself, and fills with air carried down, bubble by bubble, from the surface. Don’t look as though you didn’t believe me. It isn’t polite. I am telling you the truth. Very likely you’ll doubt me when I say that we sail in balloons, of our own making, and cross streams of water on bridges, which we can fashion as we need them—that is, we orb weavers do, for, after all, we stand at the head of the spider clan. Did you know I was an orb weaver?”
“I—I—haven’t thought about it,” said Ruth, slowly, for the question had come very suddenly, “but I’d like you to go on telling me things. Do you always hang with your head down? I should think it would make you dizzy.”
“Dizzy? Whoever heard of such a thing? Of course I keep my head down, and my toes on my telegraph lines. Then I can feel the least tremble in any one of them, and I’m pretty quick to run where I know my dinner is waiting. Sometimes I don’t hurry quite so fast. That is when the line trembles in a way which lets me know that something big has been caught. Indeed, there are times when I bite the threads around what might have been my dinner, and let it go; for it is wiser to lose a meal than run the chance of being a meal.” And Mrs. Orb Weaver winked, not with one eye only, but with all eight. “Now it is time to talk to the company,” she added, “as I am chair-spider.”
She said the last words in a loud voice, intended for all to hear; then she looked around to see if any one objected.
“They had better not,” she said to Ruth, and in a louder voice, added: “My friends, we are not appreciated. Men talk about the wonderful bees, the wonderful wasps, the wonderful ants, but few of them say anything about the wonderful spiders. Now we are wonderful, too, and we are honest, and we are industrious. We eat flies and lots of other pests, and we do not hurt orchards, or steal into pantries, or chew up clothes. Indeed, we do man no harm at all. But is he grateful? Tell me that. I’ll tell you he isn’t. Ask Mrs. Cobweb Weaver if there isn’t always some broom sweeping down the nice web she makes. I wonder she doesn’t hate a broom. No, my friends, man is not grateful. Even those who call themselves our friends are ready to pop us into bottles, or boxes, whenever they get a chance. They give us what they call a painless death in the cause of science. Now we would rather live in our own cause. At least I would.”