Clotheslines, Spiders, and Toads

We lived for a year in a little house in Michigan that was unbearably small and ugly. But it had one good point--it had a small backyard with a privacy fence on two sides and the back yard of an empty house on the other, and in the backyard was a clothesline with three lines. One by one the lines broke (they weren't the weatherproof kind) and I replaced them with the good kind. Next to the clothesline was the garage, covered with peeling paint and tiny black and white spiders. In the grass we found lots of little toads about an inch long. One day we caught some toads and put them in an aquarium. We fed them with the little black and white spiders. The toads quickly learned that the miniature babyfood jar I put in their aquarium was the source of their dinner, so they would form a semi-circle around the jar and wait for the spiders to come out. Most of the time they were an easy catch, but occasionally a larger-than-usual spider would meet a smaller-than-usual toad, jump on his back and bite. The poor toad would hop frantically around the aquarium. But in the end, the toads always won. Eventually we turned them all loose.