THE TRAVELS OF A BUTTERFLY. II

dancing ended as soon as they touched the sticky threads
of the cunning web.

The spider himself took care to keep out of sight, in his
den under a leaf, but he first fastened a long cord from his
lurking-place to the web, so that whenever a fly became entangled
there, the jerking of this thread told him of it. It was the
same as a telegraphic message to him, saying, ‘‘ Come down at
once! a fly is in the net,” and brought him down in a trice,
in good time to grasp the prey.

Then, after the foolish fly was dead, he rolled it up with
web, round and round like a bundle, and carried it off to
his larder, where he ate it all by himself.

“T have no family to provide for, that is one comfort,”
said the spider. ‘ Ah, I brought my children up the respectable
way—to shift for themselves. I have no one now to think of,
but my own—precious—self!”

No more he had. The spider’s children, although they
had only left the egg ten days before, knew each one how to
make his own little web; no bigger than a penny-piece, yet as
perfect as that of a grown-up spider.

“T don’t suppose now,” he went on, “that any other insect
has such sharp-witted children as mine. Those silly butterflies,
for instance, when they come out of the egg——’’ Here the
spider broke off; there was a great shaking in the web, and he
was obliged to attend to business and leave off talking. While
he was rolling up the third fly he had caught that morning,
and putting it by ‘‘for a rainy day,” something very curious
was going on among the little yellow dots upon the cabbage-
leatter

Each of the little eggs cracked, and out crawled, not a tiny
butterfly—although a young duck comes out of a duck’s egg,
and a tiny robin out of.a robin’s egg, and a wee spider out of