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._ THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN. An Autobiography