I forget our first words, but we exhausted the subject of the weather rather thoroughly and were pleasantly drifting into a discussion of our fellow passengers when I noticed a movement on his sleeve.

It was one of the common barn-spiders that are so often seen festooning rafters with velvety soft hangings of dove-gray. Probably chilled by the cold wind outside, the warmth of the car had brought it out of its concealment to reconnoiter.

A spider gives me the creeps, now more than ever that I know why, but then as always, I felt a surge of revulsion, struck it off his arm and crashed it with my foot.

He was smiling oddly when I looked up. “Do you know why you did that?” he said.

“Because I hate the things!” I answered. “Always did.”

“I think the word you mean is ‘dislike,’” he replied, “but I can truly say that I hate them, for I know more about them in one sense than any other living man on earth today. Shall I tell you why?”

“Do!” I said, smiled a secret smile within me, and prepared to take mental notes, for I scented a story at last.

-1-

Into Unknown Country

“Mv name is Jabez Pentreat,” he began; “my mother was English and my father a Welsh miner. They moved to this country in 1887, two years before I was born as work was scarce and living but a bare existence in the old country. Here they found it but little better, although with more ambition they might have become moderately well-to-do. When I was young, things were in a bad way for us, father worked spasmodically, while mother took in washings to tide us over hard times. We never had much money.

“I went to grade school until I was fourteen and was then obliged to leave in order that I might bring in a few dollars by my bodily labor. Brains counted for nothing in the manufacturing town where I lived. It was one of Father’s favorite sayings that ‘Book-larnin’ never did nobody no good!’ So, you see I was up against it. Three years later I ran away from home.

“I found work in Boston in connection with a fruit-importing company, and learned something of the world, as represented by the harbor-ports of South America.

“In one of those little coast towns I met a man who was to change my life. You have heard of Sir Adlington Carewe?”

“The man who astounded the scientific world with his masterly monograph on Possibilities of the Insect World?” I asked.

“That was he,” answered the man with the beady eyes. “To him I am indebted for all my knowledge. At his own expense, I finished school and entered college. At his desire, I concentrated upon botany, entomology and other kindred studies, for he hoped that I should take his place in the line of discoverers when he was gone.