“Yes, indeed. They are not very sagacious animals, though sometimes I will find one that I can’t entice into my web after the greatest endeavors. We are all very cunning, but we have to look out for some of the birds. A neighbor of mine was swinging one morning, as fine as could be, and a swallow came along, that had his nest up under the eaves, and—well, that was the last of her. The wasps, as I have already mentioned, are very bad. If one of them gets caught in our webs, we unfasten the threads as quickly as we can, and let her go, fearing that if we don’t, we shall get the worst of it.
“Our threads are very convenient,” Luxz continued, after a moment’s pause, “for we can let one end of them float out, and they stick to anything they touch, making a thoroughfare for us. I remember once those same boys put me on a chip in a large tub of water, and again laughed at my discomfiture. But I was equal to the emergency, and had soon spun out a thread the outer end of which a draught of air floated to the side of the tub, and when my tormentors were not looking, I escaped along it. We can fasten the end of our thread to the top of anything, and let ourselves down by spinning out more, or rise by pulling it in.”
“Have you any children?” asked Zed.
“O, yes!” replied Luxz, “I have some just hatching. As you go around the corner of that board you can see the nest—all fuzzy, like cotton. A few are just crawling out. They are very small as yet.”
Then the ants bade the spider good-day, and went down the fence, stopping as they passed it to see the nest, where the little wee spiders were just taking their first few steps among the delicate filmy threads surrounding their eggs. How many there were!
A fly was the next insect which absorbed the attention of our travellers, as he was poised on a grease-spot at the edge of a board along which they were walking. It was just a common house-fly, but as they were not very familiar to Zed and Zoo, he was an object of as great interest to them as any which they had met in their peregrinations.
“Good-morning,” he buzzed, “I am searching for something to eat. I have just been driven out of the house yonder, by some immense people with great cloths in their hands. They have put up frames in the windows with wire ropes in them, and I can’t get into that well-filled table. There is a man there with a bald head, too,—just the place for an enterprising fly. But these people do hate us!”
“Too bad,” said Zed sympathetically; “but if you lazy flies would make homes of your own, as ants do, and not go about where you’re not wanted, you and others would be far more contented.”
“Well,” said the fly thoughtfully, “I’m sure I don’t see why we don’t. Possibly no fly ever thought of it. It doesn’t seem to be intended that we should. I never could work out in the hot sun the way you do. The people don’t molest very often,—not as much as they’d like to; we have too sharp eyes, and too many of them. We each have hundreds and hundreds of little eyes, and every one moves and looks in a different way. It’s rather difficult to come up behind us, as the elephant did.”
“How was that?” asked Zoo.