"That question is a hard one to answer. Some people who have lived in countries where they are common claim that it is only fatal in a few cases, while others seem to think it is deadly poison."
"What are you laughing at, Uncle Harry?" demanded Charlie.
"I was thinking of the most horrible night I ever experienced," replied his uncle. "You know," he continued, "while I was in the West I spent some two weeks camping out in the mountains with a party of four young men. We had an old cabin, where we slept at night, and we spent our days delightfully, fishing, hunting, geologizing, and botanizing. We had not been in camp long before we discovered a tarantula village not far from our cabin, and we all determined to catch some specimens to take home with us. At first we had considerable trouble in catching them; they were so lively and so ugly that we always ended in killing them in self-defense. At last a brilliant member of the party discovered that by placing a wide-mouthed bottle over the mouth of the tarantula's burrow, and then thumping on the ground around it, the animal would crawl out into the bottle, and the captor could turn the bottle over, clap a piece of board over the top, and secure his prisoner. As soon as the discovery was made known, all the old pickle jars were called into requisition, and as the former occupants of the cabin had left a number, we were soon lucky, or unlucky, enough to have about twenty-five large specimens. We covered the jars with bits of shingle, and set them on a shelf which was nailed to one side of the cabin. Everything went well, and we determined that as soon as we had leisure we would kill them with chloroform, and preserve them in spirits as that one is. But one night, after we had all got comfortably settled for sleep, one of the party thought that he was thirsty, so rising carefully from his bunk, he groped his way over to the corner, under the shelf, where the water-pail stood; he had his drink, and forgetting the existence of the shelf, raised his head. Crash! down came the rotten old shelf, and down came the jars with the tarantulas in them. The party heard the fall, and like one man sprang from their beds and rushed for the door, but before they had got half-way across the floor they remembered that the tarantulas were loose, and they stopped; a moment more and it was too late. We were all afraid to move, for fear that we would put our feet on a tarantula; so there we stood, as if turned into statues. In a short time our positions became strained and cramped, but we did not dare to change them. Our nerves became excited, and we imagined that we could feel them crawling up our backs and walking over our bare feet. The minutes seemed lengthened to hours, and the hours seemed months. At last the day began to break, but we had manufactured curtains out of old newspapers, that we might sleep undisturbed by the light. Oh, how we bemoaned our laziness! Finally it grew light enough to see, and we carefully opened the door and went out. One of the party went back into the cabin and got our clothes, and after examining them carefully we dressed ourselves."
"And nobody was bitten?" said Alice, with a sigh of relief.
"No," replied her uncle, rising from his chair as the supper-bell rang; "but I don't think I ever was so badly scared before or since."
[PLANTS AND ANIMALS—THEIR DIFFERENCE.]
BY MRS. S. B. HERRICK.
Fig. 1.