young enough, was no stronger than a
big butterfly, and its blood would be quite good enough to suck.
Stealthily he crept down into the brightness of that narrow ray,
wondering whether the youngster was too big for him to tackle or not.
He made up his mind to have a go at it. In fact, he was just gathering
his immense, hairy legs beneath him for that fatal pounce of his, when
he was himself pounced upon by a flickering shadow, plucked from his
place, paralyzed by a bite through the thorax, and borne off to be
devoured at leisure by a big bat which had just come in."

"Oh, I see," muttered the Child feelingly. He was himself a good deal
afraid of spiders, and he meant that he understood now why it was less
dangerous for little bats to go swinging wildly through the twilight
clinging to their mother's necks than to stay at home alone.

But Uncle Andy paid no heed to the interruption.

"On the following night," he continued, "Little Silk Wing and his
sister found themselves once more alone in the crevice at the end of
the beam. They knew nothing of the peril from which they had been
saved the night before, so they had learned no lesson. On this night
they were restless, for their mother had fluttered away, leaving them
both a little hungry. Hunting had been bad, and she had somewhat less
milk for them than their growing appetites demanded. When once more
that slender finger of moonlight, feeling its way through a chink in
the roof, fell upon them in their crevice, it was the little sister
this time that stirred and fluttered under its ghostly touch. She
stretched one wing clear out upon the beam, and it was with difficulty
that she restrained herself from giving vent to one of her
infinitesimally thin squeaks, tiny as a bead that would drop through
the eye of a needle.

"There was no great prowling spider to catch sight of her to-night.
But a very hungry mouse, as it chanced, was just at that moment
tip-toeing along the beam, wondering what he could find that would be
good to eat. A lump of toasted cheese, or an old grease rag, or a
well-starched collar, or a lump of cold suet pudding would have suited
him nicely, but inexorable experience had taught him that such
delicacies were seldom to be found in the roof of the barn. Under the
circumstances, any old moth or beetle or spider, dead or alive, would
be better than nothing.

"How his little black, beadlike eyes glistened as they fell upon that
frail membra