For two or three weeks, more and more wrinkled by abstinence, the little Spider never relaxes her position.  Then comes the hatching.  The youngsters stretch a few threads in swing-like curves from twig to twig.  The tiny rope-dancers practise for some days in the sun; then they disperse, each intent upon his own affairs.

Let us now look at the watch-tower of the nest.  The mother is still there, but this time lifeless.  The devoted creature has known the delight of seeing her family born; she has assisted the weaklings through the trap-door; and, when her duty was done, very gently she died.  The Hen does not reach this height of self-abnegation.

Other Spiders do better still, as, for instance, the Narbonne Lycosa, or Black-bellied Tarantula (Lycosa narbonnensis, WALCK.), whose prowess has been described in an earlier chapter.  The reader will remember her burrow, her pit of a bottle-neck’s width, dug in the pebbly soil beloved by the lavender and the thyme.  The mouth is rimmed by a bastion of gravel and bits of wood cemented with silk.  There is nothing else around her dwelling:  no web, no snares of any kind.

From her inch-high turret, the Lycosa lies in wait for the passing Locust.  She gives a bound, pursues the prey and suddenly deprives it of motion with a bite in the neck.  The game is consumed on the spot, or else in the lair; the insect’s tough hide arouses no disgust.  The sturdy huntress is not a drinker of blood, like the Epeira; she needs solid food, food that crackles between the jaws.  She is like a Dog devouring his bone.

Would you care to bring her to the light of day from the depths of her well?  Insert a thin straw into the burrow and move it about.  Uneasy as to what is happening above, the recluse hastens to climb up and stops, in a threatening attitude, at some distance from the orifice.  You see her eight eyes gleaming like diamonds in the dark; you see her powerful poison-fangs yawning, ready to bite.  He who is not accustomed to the sight of this horror, rising from under the ground, cannot suppress a shiver.  B-r-r-r-r!  Let us leave the beast alone.

Chance, a poor stand-by, sometimes contrives very well.  At the beginning of the month of August, the children call me to the far side of the enclosure, rejoicing in a find which they have made under the rosemary-bushes.  It is a magnificent Lycosa, with an enormous belly, the sign of an impending delivery.

The obese Spider is gravely devouring something in the midst of a circle of onlookers.  And what?  The remains of a Lycosa a little smaller than herself, the remains of her male.  It is the end of the tragedy that concludes the nuptials.  The sweetheart is eating her lover.  I allow the matrimonial rites to be fulfilled in all their horror; and, when the last morsel of the unhappy wretch has been scrunched up, I incarcerate the terrible matron under a cage standing in an earthen pan filled with sand.