He tapped on the glass lightly, and a large, gray, hairy spider came forth from the hollow of a funnel-like web.

—­And this is all the friend you have to love? said the Master, with a tenderness in his voice which made the question very significant.

—­Nothing else loves me better than she does, that I know of,—­he answered.

—­To think of it!  Not even a dog to lick his hand, or a cat to purr and rub her fur against him!  Oh, these boarding-houses, these boarding-houses!  What forlorn people one sees stranded on their desolate shores!  Decayed gentlewomen with the poor wrecks of what once made their households beautiful, disposed around them in narrow chambers as they best may be, coming down day after day, poor souls! to sit at the board with strangers; their hearts full of sad memories which have no language but a sigh, no record but the lines of sorrow on their features; orphans, creatures with growing tendrils and nothing to cling to; lonely rich men, casting about them what to do with the wealth they never knew how to enjoy, when they shall no longer worry over keeping and increasing it; young men and young women, left to their instincts, unguarded, unwatched, save by malicious eyes, which are sure to be found and to find occupation in these miscellaneous collections of human beings; and now and then a shred of humanity like this little adust specialist, with just the resources needed to keep the “radical moisture” from entirely exhaling from his attenuated organism, and busying himself over a point of science, or compiling a hymn-book, or editing a grammar or a dictionary;—­such are the tenants of boarding-houses whom we cannot think of without feeling how sad it is when the wind is not tempered to the shorn lamb; when the solitary, whose hearts are shrivelling, are not set in families!

The Master was greatly interested in the Scarabee’s Muscarium.

—­I don’t remember,—­he said,—­that I have heard of such a thing as that before.  Mighty curious creatures, these same house-flies!  Talk about miracles!  Was there ever anything more miraculous, so far as our common observation goes, than the coming and the going of these creatures?  Why didn’t Job ask where the flies come from and where they go to?  I did not say that you and I don’t know, but how many people do know anything about it?  Where are the cradles of the young flies?  Where are the cemeteries of the dead ones, or do they die at all except when we kill them?  You think all the flies of the year are dead and gone, and there comes a warm day and all at once there is a general resurrection of ’em; they had been taking a nap, that is all.

—­I suppose you do not trust your spider in the Muscarium?—­said I, addressing the Scarabee.

—­Not exactly,—­he answered,—­she is a terrible creature.  She loves me, I think, but she is a killer and a cannibal among other insects.  I wanted to pair her with a male spider, but it wouldn’t do.