This trick, if trick there be, appears to me to turn most often to the disadvantage of the Arachnid: Tarantula, Epeira or another, as the case may be. The Calicurgus, who has just thrown her on her back, after a brisk wrestling-match, knows well enough that the insect on the ground is not dead. The Spider, thinking to protect herself, shams the lifelessness of a corpse; the assailant takes advantage of this to strike her most dangerous blow, the stab in the mouth. If the poison-tipped fangs were to open then, to snap, to bite in their despair, the Calicurgus would never dare expose the tip of her stomach to their mortal sting. The pretence of death is just what causes the success of the huntress in her risky operation. We are told, O ingenuous Epeiræ, that the struggle for life counselled you to adopt that inert attitude in your own defence. Well, the struggle for life has shown herself a very bad counsellor. You would do better to believe in common sense and learn, by degrees, at your cost, that a quick parry-and-thrust, especially when your resources permit of it, is still the best way of striking awe into the enemy. THE OLD WEEVILS CHAPTER XIII THE OLD WEEVILS In winter, when the insect enjoys an enforced rest, the study of numismatics procures me some delightful moments. I love to interrogate its metal disks, the records of the petty things which men call history. In this soil of Provence, where the Greek planted the olive-tree and the Roman planted the law, the peasant finds coins, scattered more or less everywhere, when he turns his sod. He brings them to me and consults me as to their pecuniary value, never as to their meaning. What matters to him the inscription on his treasure-trove! Men suffered of yore, they suffer to-day, they will suffer in the future: to him, all history is summed up in that! The rest is sheer futility, a pastime of the idle. I do not possess this lofty philosophy of indifference to things of the past. I scratch the piece of money with my finger-nail, I carefully strip it of its earthy rind, I examine it with the magnifying-glass, I try to decipher its legend. And my satisfaction is no small one when the little round bronze or silver disk has spoken. For then I have read a page of humanity, not in books, which are witnesses open to suspicion, but in records which are, in a manner, living and which were contemporary with the persons and the facts.