I remember feeling this passion very strongly one day during this summer of 1902 after looking at a spider. It was an interesting spider, and I found it within a couple of miles of Lyndhurst, of all places; a spot so disagreeable to me that I avoid it, and {155} look for nothing and wish for nothing to detain me in its vicinity. [Sidenote: Lyndhurst] Lyndhurst is objectionable to me not only because it is a vulgar suburb, a transcript of Chiswick or Plumstead in the New Forest where it is in a wrong atmosphere, but also because it is the spot on which London vomits out its annual crowd of collectors, who fill its numerous and ever-increasing brand-new red-brick lodging-houses, and who swarm through all the adjacent woods and heaths, men, women, and children (hateful little prigs!) with their vasculums, beer and treacle pots, green and blue butterfly nets, killing bottles, and all the detestable paraphernalia of what they would probably call "Nature Study." It happened that one day, a mile or two from Lyndhurst, going along the road I caught sight of a pretty bit of heath through an opening in the wood, and turning into it I looked out a spot to rest in, and was just about to cast myself down when I noticed a small white spider, disturbed by my step, drop from a cluster of bell-heath flowers to the ground. I stood still, and presently the spider, recovered from its alarm, drew itself up again by an invisible thread and settled down on the bright-coloured blossoms. Seating myself close by, I began to watch the strangely shaped and coloured little creature. It was a _Thomisus_--a genus of spiders distinguished by the extraordinary length of the two pairs of forelegs. The one before me, _Thomisus citreus_, is also singular on account of its colour--pale citron or white--and its habit of sitting on flowers. {156} This habit and the colour, we may see, are related. The _citreus_ is not a weaver of snares, but hunts for its prey, or rather lies in wait to capture any insect that comes to the flower on which it sits. On white, yellow, and indeed on most pale-coloured flowers, it almost becomes invisible. On the brilliant red bell-heath blossom it showed plainly enough, but even here it did not look nearly so conspicuous as when on a green leaf. [Sidenote: Wooing spider's antics]