The first thing our little Spider remembered was being crowded with a
lot of other little Spiders in a tiny brown house. This tiny house had
no windows, and was very warm and dark and stuffy. When the wind blew,
the little Spiders would hear it rushing through the forest near by, and
would feel their round brown house swinging like a cradle. It was
fastened to a bush by the edge of the forest, but they could not know
that, so they just wiggled and pushed and ate the food that they found
in the house, and wondered what it all meant. They didn't even guess
that a mother Spider had made the brown house and put the food in it for
her Spider babies to eat when they came out of their eggs. She had put
the eggs in, too, but the little Spiders didn't remember the time when
they lay curled up in the eggs. They didn't know what had been nor what
was to be--they thought that to eat and wiggle and sleep was all of
life. You see they had much to learn.
One morning the little Spiders found that the food was all gone, and
they pushed and scrambled harder than ever, because they were hungry and
wanted more. Exactly what happened nobody knew, but suddenly it grew
light, and some of them fell out of the house. All the rest scrambled
after, and there they stood, winking and blinking in the bright
sunshine, and feeling a little bit dizzy, because they were on a shaky
web made of silvery ropes.
Just then the web began to shake even more, and a beautiful great mother
Spider ran out on it. She was dressed in black and yellow velvet, and
her eight eyes glistened and gleamed in the sunlight. They had never
dreamed of such a wonderful creature.
"Well, my children," she exclaimed, "I know you must be hungry, and I
have breakfast all ready for you." So they began eating at once, and the
mother Spider told them many things about the meadow and the forest, and
said they must amuse themselves while she worked to get food for them.
There was no father Spider to help her, and, as she said, "Growing
children must have plenty of good plain food."
You can just fancy what a good time the baby Spiders had. There were a
hundred and seventy of them, so they had no chance to grow lonely, even
when their mother was away. They lived in this way for quite a while,
and grew bigger and stronger every day. One morning the mother Spider
said to her biggest daughter, "You are quite old enough to work now, and
I will teach you to spin your web."
The little Spider soon learned to draw out the silvery ropes from the
pocket in her body where they were made and kept, and very soon she had
one fastened at both ends to branches of the bush. Then her mother made
her walk out to the middle of her rope bridge, and spin and fasten two
more, so that it looked like a shining cross. After that was done, the
mother showed her something like a comb, which is part of a Spider's
foot, and taught her how to measure, and put more ropes out from the
middle of the cross, until it looked like the spokes of a wheel.
The little Spider got much discouraged, and said, "Let me finish it
some other time; I am tired of working now."