“Wait and see!” answered Uncle Andy, with the air of an oracle.  “Well, one night a streak of moonlight, like a long white finger, came in through a crack above and lit up those two tiny huddled shapes in their crevice.  It came so suddenly upon them that Little Silk Wing, under the touch of that blue-white radiance, stirred uneasily and half unfolded his wings.  The movement caught the great, gleaming eyes of an immense brown hunting spider who chanced at that moment to be prowling down the underside of the roof.  He was one of the kind that does not spin webs, but catches its prey by stealing up and pouncing upon it.  He knew that a little bat, when young enough, was no stronger than a big butterfly, and its blood would be quite good enough to suck.  Stealthily he crept down into the brightness of that narrow ray, wondering whether the youngster was too big for him to tackle or not.  He made up his mind to have a go at it.  In fact, he was just gathering his immense, hairy legs beneath him for that fatal pounce of his, when he was himself pounced upon by a flickering shadow, plucked from his place, paralyzed by a bite through the thorax, and borne off to be devoured at leisure by a big bat which had just come in.”

“Oh, I see,” muttered the Child feelingly.  He was himself a good deal afraid of spiders, and he meant that he understood now why it was less dangerous for little bats to go swinging wildly through the twilight clinging to their mother’s necks than to stay at home alone.

But Uncle Andy paid no heed to the interruption.

“On the following night,” he continued, “Little Silk Wing and his sister found themselves once more alone in the crevice at the end of the beam.  They knew nothing of the peril from which they had been saved the night before, so they had learned no lesson.  On this night they were restless, for their mother had fluttered away, leaving them both a little hungry.  Hunting had been bad, and she had somewhat less milk for them than their growing appetites demanded.  When once more that slender finger of moonlight, feeling its way through a chink in the roof, fell upon them in their crevice, it was the little sister this time that stirred and fluttered under its ghostly touch.  She stretched one wing clear out upon the beam, and it was with difficulty that she restrained herself from giving vent to one of her infinitesimally thin squeaks, tiny as a bead that would drop through the eye of a needle.

“There was no great prowling spider to catch sight of her to-night.  But a very hungry mouse, as it chanced, was just at that moment tip-toeing along the beam, wondering what he could find that would be good to eat.  A lump of toasted cheese, or an old grease rag, or a well-starched collar, or a lump of cold suet pudding would have suited him nicely, but inexorable experience had taught him that such delicacies were seldom to be found in the roof of the barn.  Under the circumstances, any old moth or beetle or spider, dead or alive, would be better than nothing.