We have here nothing similar to the lime-threads used by the Garden Spiders.  The threads are not sticky; they act only by their confused multitude.  Would you care to see the trap at work?  Throw a small Locust into the rigging.  Unable to obtain a steady foothold on that shaky support, he flounders about; and the more he struggles the more he entangles his shackles.  The Spider, spying on the threshold of her abyss, lets him have his way.  She does not run up the shrouds of the mast-work to seize the desperate prisoner; she waits until his bonds of threads, twisted backwards and forwards, make him fall on the web.

He falls; the other comes and flings herself upon her prostrate prey.  The attack is not without danger.  The Locust is demoralized rather than tied up; it is merely bits of broken thread that he is trailing from his legs.  The bold assailant does not mind.  Without troubling, like the Epeirae, to bury her capture under a paralysing winding-sheet, she feels it, to make sure of its quality, and then, regardless of kicks, inserts her fangs.

The bite is usually given at the lower end of a haunch:  not that this place is more vulnerable than any other thin-skinned part, but probably because it has a better flavour.  The different webs which I inspect to study the food in the larder show me, among other joints, various Flies and small Butterflies and carcasses of almost-untouched Locusts, all deprived of their hind-legs, or at least of one.  Locusts’ legs often dangle, emptied of their succulent contents, on the edges of the web, from the meat-hooks of the butcher’s shop.  In my urchin-days, days free from prejudices in regard to what one ate, I, like many others, was able to appreciate that dainty.  It is the equivalent, on a very small scale, of the larger legs of the Crayfish.

The rigging-builder, therefore, to whom we have just thrown a Locust attacks the prey at the lower end of a thigh.  The bite is a lingering one:  once the Spider has planted her fangs, she does not let go.  She drinks, she sips, she sucks.  When this first point is drained, she passes on to others, to the second haunch in particular, until the prey becomes an empty hulk without losing its outline.

We have seen that Garden Spiders feed in a similar way, bleeding their venison and drinking it instead of eating it.  At last, however, in the comfortable post-prandial hours, they take up the drained morsel, chew it, rechew it and reduce it to a shapeless ball.  It is a dessert for the teeth to toy with.  The Labyrinth Spider knows nothing of the diversions of the table; she flings the drained remnants out of her web, without chewing them.  Although it lasts long, the meal is eaten in perfect safety.  From the first bite, the Locust becomes a lifeless thing; the Spider’s poison has settled him.