Early one morning, ten days later, I find her preparing for her confinement.  A silk network is first spun on the ground, covering an extent about equal to the palm of one’s hand.  It is coarse and shapeless, but firmly fixed.  This is the floor on which the Spider means to operate.

On this foundation, which acts as a protection from the sand, the Lycosa fashions a round mat, the size of a two-franc piece and made of superb white silk.  With a gentle, uniform movement, which might be regulated by the wheels of a delicate piece of clockwork, the tip of the abdomen rises and falls, each time touching the supporting base a little farther away, until the extreme scope of the mechanism is attained.

Then, without the Spider’s moving her position, the oscillation is resumed in the opposite direction.  By means of this alternate motion, interspersed with numerous contacts, a segment of the sheet is obtained, of a very accurate texture.  When this is done, the Spider moves a little along a circular line and the loom works in the same manner on another segment.

The silk disk, a sort of hardly concave paten, now no longer receives aught from the spinnerets in its centre; the marginal belt alone increases in thickness.  The piece thus becomes a bowl-shaped porringer, surrounded by a wide, flat edge.

The time for the laying has come.  With one quick emission, the viscous, pale-yellow eggs are laid in the basin, where they heap together in the shape of a globe which projects largely outside the cavity.  The spinnerets are once more set going.  With short movements, as the tip of the abdomen rises and falls to weave the round mat, they cover up the exposed hemisphere.  The result is a pill set in the middle of a circular carpet.

The legs, hitherto idle, are now working.  They take up and break off one by one the threads that keep the round mat stretched on the coarse supporting network.  At the same time, the fangs grip this sheet, lift it by degrees, tear it from its base and fold it over upon the globe of eggs.  It is a laborious operation.  The whole edifice totters, the floor collapses, fouled with sand.  By a movement of the legs, those soiled shreds are cast aside.  Briefly, by means of violent tugs of the fangs, which pull, and broom-like efforts of the legs, which clear away, the Lycosa extricates the bag of eggs and removes it as a clear-cut mass, free from any adhesion.

It is a white-silk pill, soft to the touch and glutinous.  Its size is that of an average cherry.  An observant eye will notice, running horizontally around the middle, a fold which a needle is able to raise without breaking it.  This hem, generally undistinguishable from the rest of the surface, is none other than the edge of the circular mat, drawn over the lower hemisphere.  The other hemisphere, through which the youngsters will go out, is less well fortified:  its only wrapper is the texture spun over the eggs immediately after they were laid.