Spideret

What shrieks and groans of widow spideresses and orphaned spiderets must haunt his guilty slumbers!

See! what a busy region we disturb when we lift this stone! Half-a-dozen scarlet-bodied spiderets, “soldiers,” scampering away in most unmilitary haste to hide under crumbs of brown earth; here a grey-brownish slug, there a jet black one, larger and fatter, put out first one and then another tentacle, resenting the intrusion on their slumber, while you wonder how such big, soft animals can lie, to say nothing of sleeping, under a mass of stone like this.

Yesterday coming in from the garden Annie called my attention to a something in a cobweb that I had thought was a spider and had left undisturbed, but on looking at it through my glasses it seemed a cluster of tiny eggs, with one or two tiny spiderets in motion.

Mr. Merrywinkle, the spider, crawling through the corn, / Spotted Mistress June Bug on a summer morn / Oh, how he loved Ms. June Bug! […] And the couple settled, happily, within the spinach row, / To raise a thousand spiderets, each a handsome lad, / All proud as punch to call Mr. Merrywinkle, “Dad.”