"How doth the little busy bee ..." they will learn-- How doth the jolly little spider Wind up such miles of silk inside her, When it is clear that spiders' tummies Are not so big as mine or Mummy's? The explanation seems to be, They do not eat so much as me. That will point the moral of moderation in eating, you see. There will be a lot more verses, I expect; I can see _cram_ and _diaphragm_ and possibly _jam_ coming very soon. But we must get on. The spider is like the bee in this respect, that the male seems to have a most rotten time. For one thing he is nearly always about two sizes smaller than the female. Owing to that and to what _The Encyclopaedia Britannica_ humorously describes as "the greater voracity" of the female (there is a lot of quiet fun in _The Encyclopaedia Britannica_), he is a very brave spider who makes a proposal of marriage. "He makes his advances to his mate at the risk of his life and is not infrequently killed and eaten by her before or after" they are engaged ("before or after" is good). "Fully aware of the danger he pays his addresses with extreme caution, frequently waiting for hours in her vicinity before venturing to come to close quarters. Males of the _Argyopidae_ hang on the outskirts of the webs of the females and signal their presence to her by jerking the radial threads in a peculiar manner." This is, of course, the origin of the quaint modern custom by which the young man rings the bell before attempting to enter the web of his beloved in Grosvenor Square. Contemporary novelists have even placed on record cases in which the male has "waited for hours in her vicinity before venturing to come to close quarters;" but too much attention must not be paid to these imaginative accounts. If I have said enough to secure that in future a little more kindliness and respect will be shown to the spider in the nurseries of this great Empire, and a little less of it wasted on the bee, I have not misspent my time. But I shall not be content. Can we not go further? Can we not get a little more of the simplicity of spider life into this hectic world of ours? In these latitudes the spider lives only for a single season. "The young emerge from the cocoon in the early spring, grow through the summer and reach maturity in the early autumn. _The sexes then pair and perish_ soon after the female has constructed her cocoon." How delicious! No winter; no bother about coal; no worry about the children's education; just one glorious summer of sport, one wild summer of fly-catching and midge-eating, a romantic, not to say dangerous wooing, a quiet wedding in the autumn, dump the family in some nice unfurnished cocoon--and perish. Is there nothing to be said for that? How different from the miserable bee, which just goes on and on, worrying about posterity, working and working, fussing about.... Yet all our lives are modelled on the bee's. A. P. H. * * * * *