FROM the further corner of the fence, one end fastened to a bush near by, hung a spider’s silken web, regular as if made on geometrical principles. In the centre of this sat a good-sized spider, the proprietress, who had just finished devouring the most of an unwary fly, whose bloodless remains lay at her side. Up to the spider came two ants—Zed and Zoo.

“Excuse me,” said the spider, looking at them suspiciously, “for having any doubts as to the safety of making your acquaintance. But you have just been communicating with my greatest enemy, the wasp, and have been watching with heartless interest the destruction of one of my family. I am sure I hope you have no personal designs upon my life. The wasp is such a very daring foe, that I fear you, even though you are so small.”

“I assure you,” replied Zed, “that our interest in the wasp’s doings was wholly due to ignorance, and we are no friends of hers, nor have we any design against you.”

“Very well,” replied the spider, whose name was Luxz, “I am very glad. I feel in a pretty good humor this morning, having just finished a most delicious fly. I say finished, or I would offer you some. All spiders like flies. I had a most unpleasant disappointment yesterday. I was over on the window-sill of the house yonder, and saw a large fly resting on a piece of paper. Of course I sprang after him, but there was no fly there! I walked over and over him, too! One of my neighbors suggests that it was a picture; as if an intelligent spider couldn’t tell the difference between a picture and a fly!”

The two ants nodded their assent to this highly probable statement.

“You spin a great deal, I suppose?” asked Zoo.

“O, yes!” said Luxz; “I am as busy as can be. I can spin little fine threads, and coarser ones, and dance and swing all around on them. But of course the most of my time is occupied with work. It is a good deal of work to make a web, although you might not think so. There were some boys coming past here to school as I had just finished a nice web, quite a while ago, and they knocked it all down. I built another, then another, but every time those wicked creatures would destroy it, and then laugh at my dismay. Finally my pockets were as empty as could be, and I was all out of silk, so I had to go and kill another spider, and occupy her web for a time. But this I built myself.”

“You catch a good many flies?”

“Yes, indeed. They are not very sagacious animals, though sometimes I will find one that I can’t entice into my web after the greatest endeavors. We are all very cunning, but we have to look out for some of the birds. A neighbor of mine was swinging one morning, as fine as could be, and a swallow came along, that had his nest up under the eaves, and—well, that was the last of her. The wasps, as I have already mentioned, are very bad. If one of them gets caught in our webs, we unfasten the threads as quickly as we can, and let her go, fearing that if we don’t, we shall get the worst of it.

“Our threads are very convenient,” Luxz continued, after a moment’s pause, “for we can let one end of them float out, and they stick to anything they touch, making a thoroughfare for us. I remember once those same boys put me on a chip in a large tub of water, and again laughed at my discomfiture. But I was equal to the emergency, and had soon spun out a thread the outer end of which a draught of air floated to the side of the tub, and when my tormentors were not looking, I escaped along it. We can fasten the end of our thread to the top of anything, and let ourselves down by spinning out more, or rise by pulling it in.”

“Have you any children?” asked Zed.

“O, yes!” replied Luxz, “I have some just hatching. As you go around the corner of that board you can see the nest—all fuzzy, like cotton. A few are just crawling out. They are very small as yet.”

Then the ants bade the spider good-day, and went down the fence, stopping as they passed it to see the nest, where the little wee spiders were just taking their first few steps among the delicate filmy threads surrounding their eggs. How many there were!

A fly was the next insect which absorbed the attention of our travellers, as he was poised on a grease-spot at the edge of a board along which they were walking. It was just a common house-fly, but as they were not very familiar to Zed and Zoo, he was an object of as great interest to them as any which they had met in their peregrinations.

“Good-morning,” he buzzed, “I am searching for something to eat. I have just been driven out of the house yonder, by some immense people with great cloths in their hands. They have put up frames in the windows with wire ropes in them, and I can’t get into that well-filled table. There is a man there with a bald head, too,—just the place for an enterprising fly. But these people do hate us!”

“Too bad,” said Zed sympathetically; “but if you lazy flies would make homes of your own, as ants do, and not go about where you’re not wanted, you and others would be far more contented.”

“Well,” said the fly thoughtfully, “I’m sure I don’t see why we don’t. Possibly no fly ever thought of it. It doesn’t seem to be intended that we should. I never could work out in the hot sun the way you do. The people don’t molest very often,—not as much as they’d like to; we have too sharp eyes, and too many of them. We each have hundreds and hundreds of little eyes, and every one moves and looks in a different way. It’s rather difficult to come up behind us, as the elephant did.”

“How was that?” asked Zoo.

“Don’t you know?

“I’m not sure about the story; it’s just possible that it may be taken from the New York paper, but, anyway, we believe it, and often laugh at the grasshopper.”

“What do you eat?” asked Zed.

“Anything I find, almost. Flies are not at all particular. We can enjoy anything that any one does. Our mouths are hollow tubes, through which we suck whatever we wish to eat. This is a very convenient way.”

“You have enemies,” remarked Zoo. “We have just been calling on a spider who is longing for a taste of some of you.”

“You don’t say so!” cried the fly. “She is not very near here, is she? Those spider-webs are the great torment of our lives. I have had several friends caught and eaten by the spiders. The way they wind their fine, yet strong threads about one, is something remarkable. I know a pretty good verse about them, too:

That’s real pathetic, isn’t it, now?”

“Very,” answered Zed and Zoo, together.

“I met a Southern fly once,” continued the talkative fly, “and they have more enemies down there than we do in the North. Take the lizards and chameleons, for instance—”

“Oh! we know about them,” cried the little ants.

“And then the walking-sticks,” continued the fly, not pausing at the interruption, but rather looking severely at his visitors; “now, a man up here couldn’t hit on one of us with a walking-stick if he tried all day. But it’s quite different down there! A walking-stick is not a stick by the aid of which people walk, but a walking-stick, that is, a stick that walks. It is a very strange insect, and is so exactly like the broken twig of a tree, with the little branches and all, that the most sagacious person can’t tell them apart, without seeing them walk. They are called ‘devil’s walking-sticks’ by some, and we flies think it very appropriate, for they are dreadful for us—that is, for Southern flies. The people will put a walking-stick in a room full of flies, and in a short time he will have killed them all! Think how dreadful!”

“Do you know any more poetry?” asked Zed, who was rather of a literary disposition.

“Well, now, I do know a real cute little song about a fly, written by some man or other, who evidently had a baby. I will sing it for you.”

And the fly buzzed: