“The water boiled and hissed when he struck it. Once he rose, lashing feebly, and I beheld that his body was swarming with little fish that rent and tore pieces of flesh away. These were the savage little piranhas, the miniature fresh-water sharks that give short shrift to anything that falls within a school of them. Again, he came to the surface, the water frothed a bloody foam and then the last of the monster sank, in tatters, into the Caroni!

“Not many of the others escaped. After the fire had swept into the forest, I saw that the ground was black with charred bodies that lay in tumbled heaps around the skeletons of the Guaharibos. By easy stages, I made my way to civilization, bearing a stupendous tale to my friends.

“I told them my story and said in substance, ‘While you have been wasting your time for hundreds of years, searching, back through the ages; with pick and shovel scrabbling in the dust of forgotten empires; with arduous sifting of myths and legends to find some small fact; with titanic efforts of geological, biological and philological research to bring the past nearer, the link that could tell you all you wish to know—is hunting flies in the rafters of your own houses! Apply yourselves therefore to the means of wresting this secret from it, for you can learn both of this and other lands more than by your explorations.’

“They laughed as I expected they would,” he concluded bitterly.

As he finished, we were passing into Waltham and we began locating our luggage, for we had only a few more miles to travel. Then as the train neared Boston, he resumed at the original cause of our discussion upon the word “hate” of uncertain usage.

“So, while you feel repulsion,” he began, “and a sickened disgust at the sight of a spider, it is because the hereditary, subconscious memory knows that these creatures were once your lords in another existence and it commands you to obliterate this loathsome, alien life from another age. When you crushed that barn spider under your foot, you unconsciously took revenge for uncounted eras of oppression, which has made such a mark on the human brain that forever and ever most men will sicken at the sight of a spider.

“You are repelled without understanding the reason for your dislike, but I—I hate them, for I know what they are—a fact which no other man alive is certain of.

“All spiders that I come in contact with now are attracted to me. I enter a room, for instance: there is not the sign of a web about, my hostess would swear that the house is spotless, but if there is a spider it feels my presence somehow, and before I leave, I may find one perched upon my shoe, or near me, steadily gazing with its beady black eyes.