The sun rose on a bright September morning. A thousand gems of dew
sparkled in the meadows, and upon the breeze floated, in the wake of
summer, the shining silken strands of which no man knoweth the whence or
the whither.
One of them caught in the top of a tree, and the skipper, a little
speckled yellow spider, quit his airship to survey the leafy demesne
there. It was not to his liking, and, with prompt decision, he spun a new
strand and let himself down straight into the hedge below.
There were twigs and shoots in plenty there to spin a web in, and he went
to work at once, letting the strand from above, by which he had come, bear
the upper corner of it.
A fine large web it was when finished, and with this about it that set it
off from all the other webs thereabouts, that it seemed to stand straight
up in the air, without anything to show what held it. It takes pretty
sharp eyes to make out a single strand of a spider-web, even a very little
way off.
The days went by. Flies grew scarcer, as the sun rose later, and the
spider had to make his net larger that it might reach farther and catch
more. And here the strand from above turned out a great help. With it to
brace the structure, the web was spun higher and wider, until it covered
the hedge all the way across. In the wet October mornings, when it hung
full of shimmering raindrops, it was like a veil stitched with precious
pearls.
The spider was proud of his work. No longer the little thing that had come
drifting out of the vast with nothing but its unspun web in its pocket, so
to speak, he was now a big, portly, opulent spider, with the largest web
in the hedge.
One morning he awoke very much out of sorts. There had been a frost in the
night, and daylight brought no sun. The sky was overcast; not a fly was
out. All the long gray autumn day the spider sat hungry and cross in his
corner. Toward evening, to kill time, he started on a tour of inspection,
to see if anything needed bracing or mending. He pulled at all the
strands; they were firm enough. But though he found nothing wrong, his
temper did not improve; he waxed crosser than ever.
At the farthest end of the web he came at last to a strand that all at
once seemed strange to him. All the rest went this way or that--the spider
knew every stick and knob they were made fast to, every one. But this
preposterous strand went nowhere--that is to say, went straight up in the
air and was lost. He stood up on his hind legs and stared with all his
eyes, but he could not make it out. To look at, the strand went right up
into the clouds, which was nonsense.
The longer he sat and glared to no purpose, the angrier the spider grew.
He had quite forgotten how on a bright September morning he himself had
come down this same strand. And he had forgotten how, in the building of
the web and afterward when it had to be enlarged, it was just this strand
he had depended upon. He saw only that here was a useless strand, a fool
strand, that went nowhere in sense or reason, only up in the air where
solid spiders had no concern....
"Away with it!" and with one vicious snap of his angry jaws he bit the
strand in two.
That instant the web collapsed, the whole proud and prosperous structure
fell in a heap, and when the spider came to he lay sprawling in the hedge
with the web all about his head like a wet rag. In one brief moment he had
wrecked it all--because he did not understand the use of _the strand from
above_.
The following pages contain advertisements of books by the same author or
on kindred subjects.
_THE WORKS OF JACOB A. RIIS_
_The death on May 26, 1914, of JACOB A. RIIS, social reformer and civil
worker, "New York's Most Useful Citizen," as he was deservedly called by
one who best knew the scope and extent of his efforts--ex-President
Roosevelt--awakens renewed interest in the works of this "Ideal American,"
books that should find a place in every American home._
_They illustrate as few other books can the possibilities of American life
and reveal how from an almost penniless and friendless immigrant, at times
on the verge of want in the search for work, he rose through trying and
strenuous experiences by the sheer force of will and character, to
well-deserved fame and an honored position in the councils of the
mightiest of the land._