We saw no bugs or reptiles to speak of, and so I was thinking of saying in print, in a general way, that there were none at all; but one night after I had gone to bed, the Reverend came into my room carrying something, and asked, “Is this your boot?” I said it was, and he said he had met a spider going off with it. Next morning he stated that just at dawn the same spider raised his window and was coming in to get a shirt, but saw him and fled.

Howells reported many years later that he, too, encountered spiders “the bigness of bats,” and Julia C. R. Dorr, a New England poet who visited the Islands in 1883, said she saw spiders of “exceedingly large proportions.” Mark Twain said nothing about the two most noticeable kinds of creatures on the Islands today: the tiny tree frogs, which whistle such delicate serenades, did not arrive until 1880; and the first of three species of Anolis lizards, which can change their colors, was introduced in 1905.