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Then she seemed to have made a great effort and to have broken the web. But her wings were torn, and her feet were shackled by the fine strands that still adhered. She could not get them off. Wouldn't somebody help her, even as she had many a time picked off the webs from a fly's feet out of sheer pity?
The spider for such the creature was was as much frightened as I was, and crawled away in a great hurry before we could kill him, the instant Natty had assisted me in tearing off part of its web. It took some time to clear my face of the remainder, and several minutes passed before I could entirely recover my equanimity. I had seen such webs before, but had never run tilt against them.
There is a brother of the Least Sandpiper, hardly any bigger, and so much like it that you can hardly tell them apart, unless you notice that this one has two little webs between the roots of the front toes. This is the Semipalmated Sandpiper, for semipalmated means "half-webbed," as its toes are. Both kinds are called "Peeps" by people who do not know the difference between them.
We see in the sky at the present time what we may take to be object-lessons in our own history, for we see nebulæ of all sorts and sizes, and in some stars are mixed up, and in others stars are but dimly seen, so that it does not require a great stretch of the imagination to picture these stars as being born, emerging from the swaddling bands of filmy webs that have enwrapped them; and other nebulæ seem to be gas only, thin and glowing, with no stars at all to be found in it.
Beneath, the dank bronzed fern that must soon shrivel was wet, and hung with spiders' webs that like a slender netting upheld the dew. The keeper swore a good deal about a certain gentleman farmer whose lands adjoined the estate, but who held under a different proprietor.
Spinoza sat down on his truckle-bed with a great sigh of content. "Desideratoque acquiescimus lecto," he murmured. Then his eye roving around: "My spiders' webs are gone!" he groaned. "I could not disarrange aught in sweeping them away!" deprecated the goodwife. "Thou hast disarranged me! I have learnt all my wisdom from watching spiders!" he said, smiling. "Nay, thou jestest." "In no wise.
The contrast between the sane service giving men she admired, and the hopping skipping social meteor, weaver of webs, thrower of nets, who offered her his history for a nuptial acquisition, was ghastly, most discomforting. He seemed to have entangled us all. He said that he had. He treated me now confessedly as a cipher.
But Nature produces her effects at random, and seems only to increase the beautiful illusion by that infinite variety of decoration in which she revels, binding tree to tree in a tangle of anaconda-like lianas, and dwindling down from these huge cables to airy webs and hair-like fibres that vibrate to the wind of the passing insect's wing.
"After hearing the trial?" "A word in thine ear, my discreet wife. The trial convinced me far more that place makes honest men act like cruel knaves than of aught else." "Then thou holdest her innocent?" "I said not so. I have known too long how she lives by the weaving of webs. I know not how it is, but these great folks seem not to deem that truth in word and deed is a part of their religion.
What does this show? Why, that systems are all arbitrary, and suited to a certain order of minds in a certain stage of development; and that system-mongers are like spiders, who spin their webs out of their own bowels. Mr. Harrison's definition of Agnosticism shows it to be merely Atheism in disguise.
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