Discouraged by the repetition of my fruitless experiments, I throw up the game, having gained, however, a fact of some value: the Calicurgus descends, without the least fear, into the Tarantula’s den and turns her out. I imagine that things happen in the same way outside my bells. Evicted from her home, the Arachnid is more timorous and lends herself better to the attack. Besides, in the constraint of a narrow burrow, the operator would not be able to wield her lancet with the precision which her plans demand. The bold incursion shows us once again, more clearly than the hand-to-hand encounters on my table, the Lycosa’s reluctance to drive her fangs into her adversary. When the two are face to face at the bottom of the lair, that surely would be the time of times to have a word with the enemy. The Tarantula is at home; every nook and corner of the bastion is familiar to her. The intruder is constrained in her movements; she does not know her way about. Quick, a bite, my poor Lycosa, and your persecutor’s done for! You refrain, I know not why; and your reluctance is the rash one’s salvation. The silly sheep does not reply to the butcher’s knife with a butt from his horned forehead. Can you be the sheep of the Calicurgus? My two subjects are once more installed in my study, under their wire domes, with the bed of sand, the reed-stump burrow and renewed honey. They here find their first Lycosæ, feeding on crickets. The cohabitation extends over three weeks, without other incidents than scrimmages and threatenings, which become rarer from day to day. No serious hostility on either side. At last, the Calicurgi die: their day is past. A pitiful ending to a spirited start. Shall I abandon the problem? Oh, no! It is not the first that has been unable to deter me from an eagerly-cherished plan. Fortune favours the persevering. She proves this by offering me, in September, a fortnight after the death of my Tarantula-hunters, a different Calicurgus, captured for the first time. It is Calicurgus Curra, clad in the same showy style as her predecessors and almost of the same size. I know nothing about the new-comer: I wonder what she would like. A spider, that is certain: but which? A huntress of her build calls for big game: perhaps the Silky Epeira, perhaps the Banded Epeira, the two fattest Arachnids in the country, next to the Tarantula. The first hangs her great vertical web, in which the Crickets are caught, from one brake of brushwood to the next. I shall find her in the copses on the adjacent hills. The other stretches hers across the ditches and little water-courses frequented by the Dragon-flies. I shall find her near the Aygues, on the bank of the irrigation-canals fed by that torrent. Two excursions procure me the two Epeiræ. Next day, I offer them together to my captive, who shall choose according to her tastes.