Charlotte’s Web. Garth Williams

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      ‘There!’ said Charlotte. ‘Now I knock him out, so he’ll be more comfortable.’ She bit the fly. ‘He can’t feel a thing now,’ she remarked. ‘He’ll make a perfect breakfast for me.’

      ‘You mean you eat flies?’ gasped Wilbur.

      ‘Certainly. Flies, bugs, grasshoppers, choice beetles, moths, butterflies, tasty cockroaches, gnats, midges, daddy-long-legs, centipedes, mosquitoes, crickets – anything that is careless enough to get caught in my web. I have to live, don’t I?’

      ‘Why, yes, of course,’ said Wilbur. ‘Do they taste good?’

      ‘Delicious. Of course, I don’t really eat them. I drink them – drink their blood. I love blood,’ said Charlotte, and her pleasant, thin voice grew even thinner and more pleasant.

      ‘Don’t say that!’ groaned Wilbur. ‘Please don’t say things like that!’

      ‘Why not? It’s true, and I have to say what is true. I am not entirely happy about my diet of flies and bugs, but it’s the way I’m made. A spider has to pick up a living somehow or other, and I happen to be a trapper. I just naturally build a web and trap flies and other insects. My mother was a trapper before me. Her mother was a trapper before her. All our family have been trappers. Way back for thousands and thousands of years we spiders have been laying for flies and bugs.’

      ‘It’s a miserable inheritance,’ said Wilbur, gloomily. He was sad because his new friend was so bloodthirsty.

      ‘Yes, it is,’ agreed Charlotte. ‘But I can’t help it. I don’t know how the first spider in the early days of the world happened to think up this fancy idea of spinning a web, but she did, and it was clever of her, too. And since then, all of us spiders have had to work the same trick. It’s not a bad pitch, on the whole.’

      ‘It’s cruel,’ replied Wilbur, who did not intend to be argued out of his position.

      ‘Well, you can’t talk,’ said Charlotte. ‘You have your meals brought to you in a pail. Nobody feeds me. I have to get my own living. I live by my wits. I have to be sharp and clever, lest I go hungry. I have to think things out, catch what I can, take what comes. And it just so happens, my friend, that what comes is flies and insects and bugs. And furthermore,’ said Charlotte, shaking one of her legs, ‘do you realize that if I didn’t catch bugs and eat them, bugs would increase and multiply and get so numerous that they’d destroy the earth, wipe out everything?’

      ‘Really?’ said Wilbur. ‘I wouldn’t want that to happen. Perhaps your web is a good thing after all.’

      The goose had been listening to this conversation and chuckling to herself. ‘There are a lot of things Wilbur doesn’t know about life,’ she thought. ‘He’s really a very innocent little pig. He doesn’t even know what’s going to happen to him around Christmastime; he has no idea that Mr Zuckerman and Lurvy are plotting to kill him.’ And the goose raised herself a bit and poked her eggs a little further under her so that they would receive the full heat from her warm body and soft feathers.

      Charlotte stood quietly over the fly, preparing to eat it. Wilbur lay down and closed his eyes. He was tired from his wakeful night and from the excitement of meeting someone for the first time. A breeze brought him the smell of clover – the sweet-smelling world beyond his fence. ‘Well,’ he thought, ‘I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is! Charlotte is fierce, brutal, scheming, bloodthirsty – everything I don’t like. How can I learn to like her, even though she is pretty and, of course, clever?’

      Wilbur was merely suffering the doubts and fears that often go with finding a new friend. In good time he was to discover that he was mistaken about Charlotte. Underneath her rather bold and cruel exterior, she had a kind heart, and she was to prove loyal and true to the very end.

6. Summer Days

      THE EARLY summer days on a farm are the happiest and fairest days of the year. Lilacs bloom and make the air sweet, and then fade. Apple blossoms come with the lilacs, and the bees visit round among the apple trees. The days grow warm and soft. School ends, and children have time to play and to fish for trout in the brook. Avery often brought a trout home in his pocket, warm and stiff and ready to be fried for supper.

      Now that school was over, Fern visited the barn almost every day, to sit quietly on her stool. The animals treated her as an equal. The sheep lay calmly at her feet.

      Around the first of July, the work horses were hitched to the mowing machine, and Mr Zuckerman climbed into the seat and drove into the field. All morning you could hear the rattle of the machine as it went round and round, while the tall grass fell down behind the cutter bar in long green swathes. Next day, if there was no thunder shower, all hands would help rake and pitch and load, and the hay would be carried to the barn in the high hay wagon, with Fern and Avery riding at the top of the load. Then the hay would be hoisted, sweet and warm, into the big loft, until the whole barn seemed like a wonderful bed of timothy and clover. It was fine to jump in, and perfect to hide in. And sometimes Avery would find a little grass snake in the hay, and would add it to the other things in his pocket.