Lycosa, half the size of the other, clad in black velvet on the lower surface, especially under the belly, with brown chevrons on the abdomen and grey and white rings around the legs.  Her favourite home is the dry, pebbly ground, covered with sun-scorched thyme.  In my harmas {6} laboratory there are quite twenty of this Spider’s burrows.  Rarely do I pass by one of these haunts without giving a glance down the pit where gleam, like diamonds, the four great eyes, the four telescopes, of the hermit.  The four others, which are much smaller, are not visible at that depth.

Would I have greater riches, I have but to walk a hundred yards from my house, on the neighbouring plateau, once a shady forest, to-day a dreary solitude where the Cricket browses and the Wheat-ear flits from stone to stone.  The love of lucre has laid waste the land.  Because wine paid handsomely, they pulled up the forest to plant the vine.  Then came the Phylloxera, the vine-stocks perished and the once green table-land is now no more than a desolate stretch where a few tufts of hardy grasses sprout among the pebbles.  This waste-land is the Lycosa’s paradise:  in an hour’s time, if need were, I should discover a hundred burrows within a limited range.

These dwellings are pits about a foot deep, perpendicular at first and then bent elbow-wise.  The average diameter is an inch.  On the edge of the hole stands a kerb, formed of straw, bits and scraps of all sorts and even small pebbles, the size of a hazel-nut.  The whole is kept in place and cemented with silk.  Often, the Spider confines herself to drawing together the dry blades of the nearest grass, which she ties down with the straps from her spinnerets, without removing the blades from the stems; often, also, she rejects this scaffolding in favour of a masonry constructed of small stones.  The nature of the kerb is decided by the nature of the materials within the Lycosa’s reach, in the close neighbourhood of the building-yard.  There is no selection:  everything meets with approval, provided that it be near at hand.

Economy of time, therefore, causes the defensive wall to vary greatly as regards its constituent elements.  The height varies also.  One enclosure is a turret an inch high; another amounts to a mere rim.  All have their parts bound firmly together with silk; and all have the same width as the subterranean channel, of which they are the extension.  There is here no difference in diameter between the underground manor and its outwork, nor do we behold, at the opening, the platform which the turret leaves to give free play to the Italian Tarantula’s legs.  The Black-bellied Tarantula’s work takes the form of a well surmounted by its kerb.

When the soil is earthy and homogeneous, the architectural type is free from obstructions and the Spider’s dwelling is a cylindrical tube; but, when the site is pebbly, the shape is modified according to the exigencies of the digging.  In the second case, the lair is often a rough, winding cave, at intervals along whose inner wall stick blocks of stone avoided in the process of excavation.  Whether regular or irregular, the house is plastered to a certain depth with a coat of silk, which prevents earth-slips and facilitates scaling when a prompt exit is required.