-window, the
alternate sashes of which were alone intended for ventilation. Hence it
came to pass that by diligent care I was enabled to preserve my two
eight-legged acquaintances from the devouring broom of the British
housemaid, and to keep them constantly under observation at all times
and seasons during a whole summer. Of course this result was only
obtained by a distinct exercise of despotic authority, for I know those
poor spiders were a constant eyesore in Ellen's sight--the housemaid of
the moment bore the name of Ellen--but I persisted in my prohibition of
any forcible ejectment, and I carried my point in the end in the very
teeth of that constituted domestic authority. So successful was I,
indeed, that when at last we flitted southwards ourselves with the
swallows on our annual migration to the Mediterranean shores, we left
Lucy and Eliza--those were the names we had given them--in undisturbed
possession of their prescriptive rights in the drawing-room windows.
This year they are gone, and our home is left spiderless.

They were curious and uninviting pets, I'm bound to admit, those great
juicy-looking creatures. Nobody could say that any form of spider is
precisely what our Italian friends prettily describe in their liquid
way as _simpatico_. At times, indeed, the conduct of Lucy and Eliza was
so peculiarly horrible and blood-curdling in its atrocity, that even I,
their best friend, who had so often interceded for their lives and
saved them from the devastating duster of the aggressive
housemaid--even I myself, I say, more than once debated in my own mind
whether I was justified in letting them go on any longer in their
career of crime unchecked, or whether I ought not rather to rush out at
once, avenging rag in hand, and sweep them away at one fell swoop from
the surface of a world they disgraced with their unbridled wickedness.
Eliza, in particular, I'm constrained to allow, was a perfect monster
of vice--a sort of undeveloped arachnid Borgia, quick to slay and
relentless in pursuit; a mass of eight-legged sins, stained with the
colourless gore of ten thousand struggling victims, and absolutely
without a single redeeming point in her hateful character. And yet,
whenever any more than usually horrible massacre of some pretty and
innocent fly almost moved me in my righteous wrath to rush out into the
garden in hot haste and put an end at once to the cruel wretch's
existence with a judicial antimacassar, a num