The cradle had guarded the infancy of many little furred families after its first usefulness had ceased, for there were cosy tangled nests of shredded cotton and woolen material among its mixed contents. Moths had worked sad havoc in the row of worn out garments that festooned the cross beams. Some rusty muskrat traps and obsolete fire arms were heaped in one corner, with discarded hats and boots. Close to the roof, near the edge of the unprotected stairway, was a tall silent clock. It was very old. Most of the veneering had chipped away from its woodwork, parts of the enameled and grotesquely ornamented dial had scaled off, and across the scarred face its one crippled hand pointed to the figure seven. The worn mechanism had not pulsated for many years. Innumerable tiny fibers connected the top and sides of the old clock with the sloping roof timbers, and a sinister watcher, hairy and misshapen—crouched within the mouth of a tubular web above the dial. Tenuous highways spanned the spaces between the rafters. Gauzy filaments led away into obscurities, and gossamer shreds hung motionless from the upper gloom. There were mazes of webs, woven by generations of spiders, laden with impalpable dust, and tenantless. The patient spinners had lived their little day and left their airy tissues to the mercy of the years. Like flimsy relics of human endeavor, the frail structures awaited the inevitable. There was an impression of mistiness and haziness in the wandering and broken fibers, and the filmy labyrinths—as of a brain filled with fancies that were inchoate and confused—an abode of idle dreams. The web spanned attic pictured a mind, inert and fettered by dogma and tradition, in which existence is passive, and where vital currents are stilled—where light is instinctively excluded and intrusion of extraneous ideas is resented. Occupants of endowed chairs in old universities, pedantic art classicists, smug dignitaries of established churches, and other guardians of embalmed and encrusted conclusions, are apt to have such attics. Like the misshapen watcher within the tubular web above the dial, they crouch in musty seclusion. I opened the queer looking bed, that had evidently been made up a long time, and lay for half an hour or so, trying to read by the light of the sputtering candle. The subtle spell of the old attic at length overcame the charm of my author, and I gave myself over to a troop of thronging fancies. Although the invisible inmate of the muff gave a life accent to the room, the quiet was oppressive. A sense of seclusion from realities pervaded the human belongings. Intimate personal things, that only vanished hands have touched, seem to possess an indefinable remoteness—as if they pertained to something detached and far away—and lingered in an atmosphere of spiritual loneliness.