The little birds, so many piteous heads of game, will go to market, strung in dozens on a wire passed through their nostrils.
For scoundrelly ingenuity, the Epeira's net can bear comparison with the fowler's; it even surpasses it when, on patient study, the main features of its supreme perfection stand revealed.

What refinement of art for a mess of Flies! Nowhere, in the whole animal kingdom, has the need to eat inspired a more cunning industry.

If the reader will meditate upon the description that follows, he will certainly share my admiration.
In bearing and colouring, Epeira fasciata is the handsomest of the Spiders of the South.

On her fat belly, a mighty silk-warehouse nearly as large as a hazel-nut, are alternate yellow, black and silver sashes, to which she owes her epithet of Banded.

Around that portly abdomen the eight long legs, with their dark- and pale-brown rings, radiate like spokes.
Any small prey suits her; and, as long as she can find supports for her web, she settles wherever the Locust hops, wherever the Fly hovers, wherever the Dragon-fly dances or the Butterfly flits.