I was one day riding with Vincent Duarte down toward Anaheim when he suddenly dismounted to kill a large tarantula by pelting him with stones.

There ain't one man in a thousand thinks of tuckin' the sky around him when he turns in, but many a time when I've shoveled the last batch of centipedes and tarantulas into the fire, petted a side-winder good-night, and fired a farewell shot at a scalplock vanishin' over the hill, I've thought that same thing.

When finally he entered, Mrs. Grampus was as alive and alert as any tarantula of an Arizona plain aroused by a noise upon the trap-door of its retreat.

Baglivi refines on the doctrine of effluvia, by ascribing his cures of the bite of the tarantula to the peculiar undulation any instrument or tune makes by its strokes in the air; which, vibrating upon the external parts of the patient, is communicated to the whole nervous system, and produces that happy alteration in the solids and fluids which so effectually contributes to the cure.