The Lycosa shares the Cricket’s views:  like him, she finds a thousand pleasures in the vagabond life.  With September comes the nuptial badge, the black-velvet bib.  The Spiders meet at night, by the soft moonlight:  they romp together, they eat the beloved shortly after the wedding; by day, they scour the country, they track the game on the short-pile, grassy carpet, they take their fill of the joys of the sun.  That is much better than solitary meditation at the bottom of a well.  And so it is not rare to see young mothers dragging their bag of eggs, or even already carrying their family, and as yet without a home.

In October, it is time to settle down.  We then, in fact, find two sorts of burrows, which differ in diameter.  The larger, bottle-neck burrows belong to the old matrons, who have owned their house for two years at least.  The smaller, of the width of a thick lead-pencil, contain the young mothers, born that year.  By dint of long and leisurely alterations, the novice’s earths will increase in depth as well as in diameter and become roomy abodes, similar to those of the grandmothers.  In both, we find the owner and her family, the latter sometimes already hatched and sometimes still enclosed in the satin wallet.

Seeing no digging-tools, such as the excavation of the dwelling seemed to me to require, I wondered whether the Lycosa might not avail herself of some chance gallery, the work of the Cicada or the Earth-worm.  This ready-made tunnel, thought I, must shorten the labours of the Spider, who appears to be so badly off for tools; she would only have to enlarge it and put it in order.  I was wrong:  the burrow is excavated, from start to finish, by her unaided labour.

Then where are the digging-implements?  We think of the legs, of the claws.  We think of them, but reflection tells us that tools such as these would not do:  they are too long and too difficult to wield in a confined space.  What is required is the miner’s short-handled pick, wherewith to drive hard, to insert, to lever and to extract; what is required is the sharp point that enters the earth and crumbles it into fragments.  There remain the Lycosa’s fangs, delicate weapons which we at first hesitate to associate with such work, so illogical does it seem to dig a pit with surgeon’s scalpels.

The fangs are a pair of sharp, curved points, which, when at rest, crook like a finger and take shelter between two strong pillars.  The Cat sheathes her claws under the velvet of the paw, to preserve their edge and sharpness.  In the same way, the Lycosa protects her poisoned daggers by folding them within the case of two powerful columns, which come plumb on the surface and contain the muscles that work them.