e. Often, however, have I stood beside its large web, when
the creature occupied its place in the centre, and, touching it with a
withered grass stalk, I have seen it sullenly swing on the lines "with
its hands," and then shake them with a motion so rapid, that--like
Carathis, the mother of the Caliph Vathek, who, when her hour of doom
had come, "glanced off in a rapid whirl, which rendered her
invisible"--the eye failed to see either web or insect for minutes
together. Nothing appeals more powerfully to the youthful fancy than
those coats, rings, and amulets of eastern lore, that conferred on their
possessors the gift of invisibility. I learned, too, to take an especial
interest in what, though they belong to a different family, are known as
the Water _Spiders_; and have watched them speeding by fits and starts,
like skaters on the ice, across the surface of some woodland spring or
streamlet--fearless walkers on the waters, that, with true faith in the
integrity of the implanted instinct, never made shipwreck in the eddy or
sank in the pool. It is to these little creatures that Wordsworth refers
in one of his sonnets on sleep:--

"O sleep, thou art to me
A fly that up and down himself doth shove
Upon a fretful rivulet; now _above_,
Now _on_ the water, vexed with mockery."

As shown, however, to the poet himself on one occasion, somewhat to his
discomfort, by assuredly no mean authority--Mr. James Wilson--the
"vexed" "fly," though one of the hemipterous insects, never uses its
wings, and so never gets "_above_" the water. Among my other favourites
were the splendid dragon-flies, the crimson-speckled Burnet moths, and
the small azure butterflies, that, when fluttering among delicate
harebells and crimson-tipped daisies, used to suggest to me, long ere I
became acquainted with the pretty figure of Moore,[3] or even ere the
figure had been produced, the idea of flowers that had taken to flying.
The wild honey bees, too, in their several species, had peculiar charms
for me. There were the buff-coloured carders, that erected over their
honey-jars domes of moss; the lapidary red-tipped bees, that built amid
the recesses of ancient cairns, and in old dry stone walls, and were so
invincibly brave in defending their homesteads, that they never gave up
the quarrel till they died; and, above all, the yellow-zoned
humble-bees, that lodged deep in the ground along the dry sides of
grassy banks, an