INTRODUCTION. I REMEMBER that one moist, warm summer morning, when I was a little girl, I wandered into an old orchard before the sun had risen. The air seemed full of loose silver threads, floating and swaying, the aerial clues flung out by adventurous spiders seeking the day's fortune. Near me was a bare limb of a half-dead appletree; and, while I looked and wondered, many of these clues attached themselves to the splitting bark, and the proprietors of these "ropewalks in the air” began to pull their cables in, and to run back and forth, clearing away superfluous knots, yet holding safe the diamond setting of their silver chains. They were natives of many far-sundered homes: there was the big wood spider, clad in a heavy set of winter furs, first cousin to the tarantula; the spotted mite, terror of nursery beds; the loosejointed "spinner," full of nursery cares; but, however they looked and whatever they did, each was a deft workman, and kept unsullied the charm of the new-born day. Why should all those tiny threads have floated to that one branch? I asked myself again and again, but I could not tell. Perhaps it was because the branch was bare, and had no proper function of its own. Perhaps its purposeless existence left it free, to entertain the vagaries of its many-legged visitors. For some such reason, it may be, the threads of the following story floated before my asking eyes, and have been gathered into my waiting hand. Because I would not shake the dew-drops from the web, I tell the story in my proper person. |