Be it feeble or strong, the game is now neatly trussed, by one of the two methods.  The next move never varies.  The bound insect is bitten, without persistency and without any wound that shows.  The Spider next retires and allows the bite to act, which it soon does.  She then returns.

If the victim be small, a Clothes-moth, for instance, it is consumed on the spot, at the place where it was captured.  But, for a prize of some importance, on which she hopes to feast for many an hour, sometimes for many a day, the Spider needs a sequestered dining-room, where there is naught to fear from the stickiness of the network.  Before going to it, she first makes her prey turn in the converse direction to that of the original rotation.  Her object is to free the nearest spokes, which supplied pivots for the machinery.  They are essential factors which it behoves her to keep intact, if need be by sacrificing a few cross-bars.

It is done; the twisted ends are put back into position.  The well-trussed game is at last removed from the web and fastened on behind with a thread.  The Spider then marches in front and the load is trundled across the web and hoisted to the resting-floor, which is both an inspection-post and a dining-hall.  When the Spider is of a species that shuns the light and possesses a telegraph-line, she mounts to her daytime hiding-place along this line, with the game bumping against her heels.

While she is refreshing herself, let us enquire into the effects of the little bite previously administered to the silk-swathed captive.  Does the Spider kill the patient with a view to avoiding unseasonable jerks, protests so disagreeable at dinner-time?  Several reasons make me doubt it.  In the first place, the attack is so much veiled as to have all the appearance of a mere kiss.  Besides, it is made anywhere, at the first spot that offers.  The expert slayers {33} employ methods of the highest precision:  they give a stab in the neck, or under the throat; they wound the cervical nerve-centres, the seat of energy.  The paralyzers, those accomplished anatomists, poison the motor nerve-centres, of which they know the number and position.  The Epeira possesses none of this fearsome knowledge.  She inserts her fangs at random, as the Bee does her sting.  She does not select one spot rather than another; she bites indifferently at whatever comes within reach.  This being so, her poison would have to possess unparalleled virulence to produce a corpse-like inertia no matter which the point attacked.  I can scarcely believe in instantaneous death resulting from the bite, especially in the case of insects, with their highly-resistant organisms.

Besides, is it really a corpse that the Epeira wants, she who feeds on blood much more than on flesh?  It were to her advantage to suck a live body, wherein the flow of the liquids, set in movement by the pulsation of the dorsal vessel, that rudimentary heart of insects, must act more freely than in a lifeless body, with its stagnant fluids.  The game which the Spider means to suck dry might very well not be dead.  This is easily ascertained.