night, from night till morning. From the soft, green leaves it
sawed out a neat little oval with its sharp jaws, rolled it
together as one rolls up a real carpet, and with the precious
burden pressed to it, it fluttered away to the park and lighted on
an old tree stump. There it burrowed down through dark passage-ways
and mysterious galleries, until at last it reached the bottom of a
perpendicular shaft. In its unknown depths, where neither ant nor
centipede ever had ventured, it spread out the green leaf roll and
covered the uneven floor with the most beautiful carpet. And when
the floor was covered, the bee came back for new leaves to cover
the walls of the shaft, and worked so quickly and eagerly, that
there was soon not a leaf in the rose hedge that did not have an
oval hole which bore testimony that it had been forced to assist in
the adorning of the old tree-stump.

One fine day the little bee changed its occupation. It bored deep
in among the ragged petals of the full-blown roses, sucked and
drank all it could in those beautiful larders, and when it had got
its fill, it flew quickly away to the old stump to fill the
freshly-papered chambers with brightest honey.

The little upholsterer bee was not the only one who worked in the
rose-bushes. There was also a spider, a quite unparalleled spider.
It was bigger than any spider I have ever seen; it was bright
orange with a clearly marked cross on its back, and it had eight
long, red-and-white striped legs, all equally well marked. You
ought to have seen it spin! Every thread was drawn out with the
greatest precision from the first ones that were only for supports
to the last fine connecting thread. And you should have seen it
balance its way along the slender threads to seize a fly or to take
its place in the middle of the web, motionless, patient, waiting
for hours.

That big, orange spider won my heart; he was so patient and so
wise. Every day he had his little encounter with the upholsterer
bee, and he always came out of the affair with the same unfailing
tact. The bee who took his way close by him caught time and time
again in his net. Instantly it began to buzz and tear; it dragged
at the fine web and behaved like a mad thing, which naturally
resulted in its being more and more entangled and getting both legs
and wings wound up in the sticky net.

As soon as the bee was exhausted and weakened, the spider came
creeping out to it. It kept always at a respec