have not been too much for her.

I also notice an increased fervour in the chase. While burdened with her
family, she was remarkably abstemious, accepting only with great reserve
the game placed at her disposal. The coldness of the season may have
militated against copious refections; perhaps also the weight of the
little ones hampered her movements and made her more discreet in
attacking the prey.

To-day, cheered by the fine weather and able to move freely, she hurries
up from her lair each time I set a tit-bit to her liking buzzing at the
entrance to her burrow; she comes and takes from my fingers the savoury
Locust, the portly Anoxia; {26} and this performance is repeated daily,
whenever I have the leisure to devote to it. After a frugal winter, the
time has come for plentiful repasts.

This appetite tells us that the animal is not at the point of death; one
does not feast in this way with a played-out stomach. My boarders are
entering in full vigour upon their fourth year. In the winter, in the
fields, I used to find large mothers, carting their young, and others not
much more than half their size. The whole series, therefore, represented
three generations. And now, in my earthenware pans, after the departure
of the family, the old matrons still carry on and continue as strong as
ever. Every outward appearance tells us that, after becoming
great-grandmothers, they still keep themselves fit for propagating their
species.

The facts correspond with these anticipations. When September returns,
my captives are dragging a bag as bulky as that of last year. For a long
time, even when the eggs of the others have been hatched for some weeks
past, the mothers come daily to the threshold of the burrow and hold out
their wallets for incubation by the sun. Their perseverance is not
rewarded: nothing issues from the satin purse; nothing stirs within. Why?
Because, in the prison of my cages, the eggs have had no father. Tired
of waiting and at last recognizing the barrenness of their produce, they
push the bag of eggs outside the burrow and trouble about it no more. At
the return of spring, by which time the family, if developed according to
rule, would have been emancipated, they die. The mighty Spider of the
waste-lands, therefore, attains to an even more patriarchal age than her
neighbour the Sacred Beetle: {27} she lives for five years at the very
least.

Let us leave the mothers to their business and ret