his story, you or I?"

"I won't interrupt any more!" said the Child penitently. "But why was
he called Little Silk Wing, Uncle Andy?"

His uncle looked at him in despair. Then he answered, with unwonted
resignation, "His wings weren't really any silkier than those of his
tiny sister. But he got hold of the name _first_, that's all. So it
was his!

"When the two were first born they were so tiny as to be quite
ridiculous--little shriveled, pale mites, that could do nothing but
hang to their mother's breasts, and nurse diligently, and grow. They
grew almost at once to the same color as their mother, plumped out till
they were so big as to be not quite lost in a thimble and developed a
marvelous power of clinging to their mother's body while she went
careering through the air in her dizzy evolutions.

"But when they were big enough for their weight to be a serious
interference with their mother's hunting, then she was forced, most
reluctantly, to leave them at home sometimes. She would take them both
together into the narrow crevice between the top beam and the slope of
the roof, and there they would lie motionless, shrouded in their
exquisitely fine, mouse-colored wing membranes, and looking for all the
world like two little bits of dry wood. It was not always lonely for
them, because there were usually at least two or three grown-up bats
hanging by their toes from the edge of a nearby crack, taking brief
rest from the toil of their aerial chase. But it was always
monotonous, unless they were asleep. For all movement was rigorously
forbidden them, as being liable to betray them to some foe."

"Why, what could get at them, away up there?" demanded the Child, to
whom the peak of a lead always seemed the remotest, most inaccessible,
and most mysterious of spots.

"Wait and see!" answered Uncle Andy, with the air of an oracle. "Well,
one night a streak of moonlight, like a long white finger, came in
through a crack above and lit up those two tiny huddled shapes in their
crevice. It came so suddenly upon them that Little Silk Wing, under
the touch of that blue-white radiance, stirred uneasily and half
unfolded his wings. The movement caught the great, gleaming eyes of an
immense brown hunting spider who chanced at that moment to be prowling
down the underside of the roof. He was one of the kind that does not
spin webs, but catches its prey by stealing up and pouncing upon it.
He knew that a little bat, when