he strange courtship, which we could only observe in the
case of the cruel Eliza, the rather gentler Lucy having been already
mated, apparently, before she took up her quarters in our climbing
white rose-bush. One day, however, a timid-looking male spider, with
inquiry and doubt in every movement of his tarsi, strolled tentatively
up on the neat round web where Eliza was hanging, head downward as
usual, all her feet on the thread, on the look-out for house-flies. We
knew he was a male at once by his longer and thinner body, and by his
natural modesty. He walked gingerly on all eights, like an arachnid
Agag, in the direction of the object of his ardent affections, with a
most comic uncertainty in every step he took towards her. His claws
felt the threads as he moved with anxious care; and it was clear he was
ready at a moment's notice to jump away and flee for his life with
headlong speed to his native obscurity if Eliza showed the slightest
disposition, by gesture or movement, to turn and rend him. Now and
again, as he approached, Eliza, half coquettish, moved her feet a short
step, and seemed to debate within her own mind in which spirit she
should meet his flattering advances--whether to accept him or to eat
him. At each such hesitation, the unhappy male, fearing the worst, and
sore afraid, would turn on his heel and fly for dear life as fast as
eight trembling legs would carry him. Then, after a minute or two, he
would evidently come to the conclusion that he had wronged his
lady-love, and that her movement was one of true, true love rather than
of carnivorous and cannibalistic appetite. At last, as I judged, his
constancy was rewarded, though his ominous disappearance very shortly
afterwards made me fear for the worst as to his final adventures.

In the end, Eliza laid a large number of eggs in a silken cocoon, in
shape a balloon, and secreted, like the web, by her invaluable
spinnerets. Indeed, the real reason--I won't say excuse--for the
rapacity and Gargantuan appetite of the spider lies, no doubt, in the
immense amount of material she has to supply for her daily-renewed
webs, her home, and her cocoon, all which have actually to be spun out
of the assimilated food-stuffs in her own body; to say nothing of the
additional necessity imposed upon her by nature for laying a trifle of
six or seven hundred eggs in a single summer. And, to tell the truth,
Lucy and Eliza seemed to us to be always eating. No matter at what