“It disgusts me,” interrupted the commodore brusquely.  “Pouah!”

It had turned over in his fingers.

“Oh!  I don’t know why,” he declared, “spiders have always frozen my blood!”

Dr. Weber began to laugh, and I, who shared the feelings of Sir Thomas, exclaimed: 

“Yes, cousin, you ought to take this villainous beast out of the box—­it is disgusting—­it spoils all the rest.”

“Little chump,” he said, his eyes sparkling, “what makes you look at it?  If you don’t like it, go take yourself off somewhere.”

Evidently he had taken offense; and Sir Thomas, who was then before the window contemplating the mountain, turned suddenly, took me by the hand, and said to me in a manner full of good will: 

“Your tutor, Frantz, sets great store by his spider; we like the trees better—­the verdure.  Come, let’s go for a walk.”

“Yes, go,” cried the doctor, “and come back for supper at six o’clock.”

Then raising his voice: 

“No hard feelings, Sir Hawerburch.”

The commodore replied laughingly, and we got into the carriage, which was always waiting in front of the door of the house.

Sir Thomas wanted to drive himself and dismissed his servant.  He made me sit beside him on the same seat and we started off for Rothalps.

While the carriage was slowly ascending the sandy path, an invincible sadness possessed itself of my spirit.  Sir Thomas, on his part, was grave.  He perceived my sadness and said: 

“You don’t like spiders, Frantz, nor do I either.  But thank Heaven, there aren’t any dangerous ones in this country.  The spider crab which your tutor has in his box comes from French Guiana.  It inhabits the great, swampy forests filled with warm vapors, with scalding exhalations; this temperature is necessary to its life.  Its web, or rather its vast snare, envelops an entire thicket.  In it it takes birds as our spiders take flies.  But drive these disgusting images from your mind, and drink a swallow of my old Burgundy.”

Then turning, he raised the cover of the rear seat, and drew from the straw a sort of gourd from which he poured me a full bumper in a leather goblet.

When I had drunk all my good humor returned and I began to laugh at my fright.

The carriage was drawn by a little Ardennes horse, thin and nervous as a goat, which clambered up the nearly perpendicular path.  Thousands of insects hummed in the bushes.  At our right, at a hundred paces or more, the somber outskirts of the Rothalp forests extended below us, the profound shades of which, choked with briers and foul brush, showed here and there an opening filled with light.  On our left tumbled the stream of Spinbronn, and the more we climbed the more did its silvered sheets, floating in the abyss, grow tinged with azure and redouble their sound of cymbals.