For four or five weeks longer, the mother never ceases her leisurely inspection-rounds, happy at hearing the new-born Spiders swarming in the wallet.  At length, when October ends, she clutches her offspring’s nursery and dies withered.  She has done all that maternal devotion can do; the special providence of tiny animals will do the rest.  When spring comes, the youngsters will emerge from their snug habitation, disperse all over the neighbourhood by the expedient of the floating thread and weave their first attempts at a labyrinth on the tufts of thyme.

Accurate in structure and neat in silk-work though they be, the nests of the caged captives do not tell us everything; we must go back to what happens in the fields, with their complicated conditions.  Towards the end of December, I again set out in search, aided by all my youthful collaborators.  We inspect the stunted rosemaries along the edge of a path sheltered by a rocky, wooded slope; we lift the branches that spread over the ground.  Our zeal is rewarded with success.  In a couple of hours, I am the owner of some nests.

Pitiful pieces of work are they, injured beyond recognition by the assaults of the weather!  It needs the eyes of faith to see in these ruins the equivalent of the edifices built inside my cages.  Fastened to the creeping branch, the unsightly bundle lies on the sand heaped up by the rains.  Oak-leaves, roughly joined by a few threads, wrap it all round.  One of these leaves, larger than the others, roofs it in and serves as a scaffolding for the whole of the ceiling.  If we did not see the silky remnants of the two vestibules projecting and feel a certain resistance when separating the parts of the bundle, we might take the thing for a casual accumulation, the work of the rain and the wind.

Let us examine our find and look more closely into its shapelessness.  Here is the large room, the maternal cabin, which rips as the coating of leaves is removed; here are the circular galleries of the guard-room; here are the central chamber and its pillars, all in a fabric of immaculate white.  The dirt from the damp ground has not penetrated to this dwelling protected by its wrapper of dead leaves.

Now open the habitation of the offspring.  What is this?  To my utter astonishment, the contents of the chamber are a kernel of earthy matters, as though the muddy rain-water had been allowed to soak through.  Put aside that idea, says the satin wall, which itself is perfectly clean inside.  It is most certainly the mother’s doing, a deliberate piece of work, executed with minute care.  The grains of sand are stuck together with a cement of silk; and the whole resists the pressure of the fingers.

If we continue to unshell the kernel, we find, below this mineral layer, a last silken tunic that forms a globe around the brood.  No sooner do we tear this final covering than the frightened little ones run away and scatter with an agility that is singular at this cold and torpid season.