Evening star., 1905-11-04
THE STRAND FROM ABOVE.

From the Danish of Johannes Jorgensen, by Jacob
A. Riis, - the Outlook.
The sun rose on a bright September morn
Ing. A thousand gems Of dew sparked in
the meadows, and upon the breeze fioated
In the wake of summer, the shining silken
strands of which no man knoweth the
whence or the whittier
One of them caught In the top of a tree,
and the skipper. little speckled yellow
spider. quit his airship to survey the leafy
demesne there. Ii was not to his liking,
and with prompt decision he spun new
strand and let himself down straight into
the hedge below.
There were twigs and shoots In plenty
there to spin web In, and lie 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 his about it that set it off from
all the other webs therea bouts that II
seemed to stand straight up in the air.
without anything to show what held il. 1t
takes pretty sharp eyes to make out single
strand of ii 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 il might reach
farther and catch more. And here the
strand from above turned out a great help.
spun higher and wider, until it covered the
hedge all the way across. In the wet Octo-
Der mornings, when 1t hung full of SHIN
merng raindrops, ii was like a veil stitched
with precious pearls.
The spider proud of his work No
longer the little thing that had come drift
Ing out of the vast with nothing but its ur-
spun 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 woke 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 il anything needed bracing or mending
He pulled at all the strands; they were
hrm 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
al last TO strand that at 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- ev-
cry one. But this preposterous strand went
nowhere-that is to say went straight lip In
the air and was lost. He stood un on his
hind legs and stared with all his eyes but
he could not make II out. To look at, the
strand went right up into the clouds. which
was nonsense.
The longer he sat and glared to no pur-
pose. the angrier the spider grew He had
quite forgotten how. on 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 1t had 10 be enlarged, 1t was just this
strand he had depended upon. He saw
only that here was useless strand, a fool
strand, that went nowhere in sense or rea-
son. only up in the air. where solid spiders
had no concern.
Away with itr' 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
sprawing in the hedge, with the web all
ABOUT his head like wet rag. In one
brief moment he had wrecked 1t all-be-
cause he did not understand the use of the
strand from above.