Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE TARANTULA, AND OTHER RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES The fact was that she did look old-maidish, in the square-tabbed brown velveteen jacket, made over from one of Aunt Sallie's, and starched brown chambray skirts standing out, stockade-like, round her stalwart long legs. And yet her clothes were in no wise quaint. They conformed to the juvenile modes of that good year 1894. Her shoes were trim, her calves well rounded and snugly stockinged; her clover-trimmed hat was a pretty, childlike piece of country millinery, bought at the young milliner's in the New Street. It was her old-maidish way of wearing her clothes, and something in her earnest, unhumorous face that suggested spectacles. Saddled with the reverberating epithet " old maid" she went home and crossed into the pasture beyond the schoolhouse, where she knew all the arts of hopping into the safe center of cinquefoil or " prairie-weed" bushes which formed bristling oases between gulfs of bottomless black cow-trampled mud. She was looking for the pale long-horned violets and the wee fairy white violets that grew there. She meant to make a wreath of them for her doll. She was just going to hop on a big flat stone which diversified the prairie-weed, and in the cracks of whichsome sweet little ferns, that would be charming on a doll's hat, were sprouting, when " Oh, my soul and body! " There was an enormous, ominous black spider, undoubtedly a tarantula, such as came in bunches of bananas, and if they bit you, you died within an hour,— there was a tarantula, right on that stone, that would have bitten right through her low yellow ties, without turning a hair, if she had taken the step one stout long leg was raised to take. She froze back into the prairie- weed bush and looked with charmed glazed eyes at ... --This text refers to the Paperback edition.