now;
or if it does it doesn't let on. But the whole tedious routine of the
bee's domestic pottering day is an open book to us. Ask yourself,
which would you rather do, be able to collect honey and put it in a
suitable receptacle, or be able to let yourself down from the top
floor to the basement by a silken rope produced out of your tummy, and
then climb up it again when you want to go upstairs, just winding up
the rope inside you? I think you will agree that the spider has it. It
is hard enough, goodness knows, to wind up an ordinary ball of string
so that it will go into the string-box properly. What one would do if
one had to put it in one's bread-box I can't think. When my children
grow up, instead of learning

"How doth the little busy bee ..."

they will learn--

How doth the jolly little spider
Wind up such miles of silk inside her,
When it is clear that spiders' tummies
Are not so big as mine or Mummy's?
The explanation seems to be,
They do not eat so much as me.

That will point the moral of moderation in eating, you see. There will
be a lot more verses, I expect; I can see _cram_ and _diaphragm_ and
possibly _jam_ coming very soon. But we must get on.

The spider is like the bee in this respect, that the male seems to
have a most rotten time. For one thing he is nearly always about
two sizes smaller than the female. Owing to that and to what _The
Encyclopaedia Britannica_ humorously describes as "the greater
voracity" of the female (there is a lot of quiet fun in _The
Encyclopaedia Britannica_), he is a very brave spider who makes a
proposal of marriage. "He makes his advances to his mate at the risk
of his life and is not infrequently killed and eaten by her before or
after" they are engaged ("before or after" is good). "Fully aware of
the danger he pays his addresses with extreme caution, frequently
waiting for hours in her vicinity before venturing to come to close
quarters. Males of the _Argyopidae_ hang on the outskirts of the webs
of the females and signal their presence to her by jerking the radial
threads in a peculiar manner." This is, of course, the origin of the
quaint modern custom by which the young man rings the bell before
attempting to enter the web of his beloved in Grosvenor Square.
Contemporary novelists have even placed on record cases in which the
male has "waited for hours in her vicinity before venturing to come
to close quarters;" but too much attention must not b