r
struggling and consequent damage to the precious web; but more often
she merely proceeded to eat it alive without further formality, still
avoiding its sting as long as the creature had a kick left in it, but
otherwise entirely ignoring its character as a sentient being in the
most inhuman fashion. And all the time, till the last drop of his blood
was sucked out, the wasp would continue viciously to stick out his
deadly sting, which the spider would still avoid with hereditary
cunning. It was a horrid sight--a duel _a outrance_ between two equally
hateful and poisonous opponents; a living commentary on the appalling
but o'er-true words of the poet, that 'Nature is one with rapine, a
harm no preacher can heal.' Though these were the occasions when one
sometimes felt as if the cup of Eliza's iniquities was really full, and
one must pass sentence at last, without respite or reprieve, upon that
life-long murderess.

One insect there was, however, before which even Eliza herself,
hardened wretch as she seemed, used to cower and shiver; and that was
the great black bumble-bee, the largest and most powerful of the
British bee-kind. When one of these dangerous monsters, a burly,
buzzing bourgeois, got entangled in her web, Eliza, shaking in her
shoes (I allow her those shoes by poetical licence) would retire in
high dudgeon to her inmost bower, and there would sit and sulk, in
visible bad temper, till the clumsy big thing, after many futile
efforts, had torn its way by main force out of the coils that
surrounded it. Then, the moment the telegraphic communication told her
the lines in the web were once more free, Eliza would sally forth again
with a smiling face--oh yes, I assure you, we could tell by her look
when she was smiling--and would repair afresh with cheerful alacrity
the damage done to her snare by the unwelcome visitor. Hummingbird
hawk-moths, on the other hand, though so big and quick, she would kill
immediately. As for Lucy, craven soul, she had so little sense of
proper pride and arachnid honour, that she shrank even from the wasps
which Eliza so bravely and unhesitatingly tackled; and more than once
we caught her in the very act of cutting them out entire, with the
whole piece of web in which they were immeshed, and letting them drop
on to the ground beneath, merely as a short way of getting rid of them
from her premises. I always rather despised Lucy. She hadn't even the
one redeeming virtue of most carnivoro