Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/394

378 colors among them, yet some of them are gorgeous in the extreme. A little crab spider that built a house in my garden was the brightest lemon-yellow all over, and shone like a jewel amid the dark green of the surrounding foliage.

One of the English spiders has a black head and thorax, with an orange-red body, on which are six black spots, each ringed with white; another has a green coat with brilliant red and yellow striped trousers, for all the world like a king's jester. One dainty lady is clad in violet and white, a flaunting miss in black and flame-color, and her sister in cherry and brown.

Some of the Thomisidœ, are the exact colors of certain flowers, in the centers of which they sit all day, watching for the insects that come to get honey.

Two of the spiders' worst enemies are mud wasps and ichneumon flies. In searching recently for spiders beneath the clapboards on the south side of the house, I came across one of those curious structures which the mud wasp builds. I broke it open, and out tumbled a quantity of small spiders. The wasp's storehouse was in three compartments, and all together contained forty-nine spiders, all of the same kind and about the same size, in a torpid condition. The wasp had laid an egg in each of these spiders. She does not kill the spider, but merely stupefies it, so that when her egg hatches the larva may feed upon the luckless spider.

If one be a student of Nature he will perhaps have noticed a spider rush away and hide in her crack without any apparent reason. The moment before she had been enjoying the bright sunshine, and the student wonders why she ran away. The spider's perceptions are so keen that she knows long before he does that the sky will soon be overcast and torrents of rain descend or a cold wind begin to blow. If she stayed out she might soon be benumbed and unable to run into her house.

The water spiders are covered with hairs which shed the water, so that they never get wet. The little house under the water in which they live and raise their families is as snug and dry inside as yours and mine.

No spiders are more interesting than the trapdoor spiders and their first cousins the tarantulas. The former live in Europe and California. First, they make a burrow in the ground and then build the door. The California ones make their door of mud and sticks. It fits into the tube as a cork does into a bottle. The covers built by the European species are mere little lids, but they are always built so as to resemble the surrounding surface. One kind shows her sagacity by building a sort of double door, by which she can escape should an enemy storm her fort. At the surface is the usual door, and a few inches below this another.