A small-sized spider had made his web on the under side of a table.
Early one morning a small grasshopper was noticed on the floor, directly
under the web, and on approaching to take it away, it was found that the
spider had thrown a line round one of its legs. While the observer was
looking at it, the spider came down and lassoed the opposite leg of the
grasshopper, and continued for several minutes darting up and down, and
fastening lines to different parts of the body of his victim. The
struggles of the grasshopper, though a full-grown one, were unavailing
to effect his escape.
As his struggles became more and more feeble, the spider threw his lines
round him; and when he had become nearly exhausted, his captor proceeded
to raise him from the floor. This he did by raising one end at a time.
He at first raised the head and part of the body nearly half an inch,
then raised the other end, and continued so to work until the
grasshopper was elevated five or six inches. Thus hung in chains, the
victim was left to die.
The "trap-door spider" is indeed most interesting. Erber tells us in
_Life and Her Children_, by A. B. Buckley, that he once sat for hours on
a moonlight night watching the doings of these insects. He saw two of
the spiders come out each from its hole, and pushing open their doors,
fasten them back by fine threads to blades of grass. They then spun a
web round the open hole, and went back into their tunnels. By-and-by two
beetles were caught, one in each web. In an instant the spiders darted
out, and pierced their victims with their poisoned fangs, sucked out
their soft flesh, and carried the empty bodies away some distance from
their holes. Erber left them; but on returning in the morning, he found
the spiders had cleared away all trace of the webs, and were shut down
snugly in their hidden homes.
Who among us works more cleverly or with more industry for daily bread
than these little spiders? They do it, too, under many difficulties and
dangers; for birds and lizards are watching above-ground to make a meal
of them, whilst crawling insects creep into their holes to attack them.
Some of these spiders have learned a means of escaping even this danger,
for they make a second tunnel branching out of the first, and build a
doorway between the two, so that they can retreat into the second
passage in case of attack, and, by setting their backs against the door,
baffle the intruder.
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