The place grew to me so inseparably connected with the horror of the news that I instinctively abandoned it; but to-day, finding myself close to the place—nearly ten years had passed without my visiting it—I turned aside, musing on the old sadness, with something in my heart of the soft regret that a sorrow wears when seen through the haze of years. There was the place, just the same; I bent to see a passing train and (I had forgotten all about them) there were my red spiders still pursuing their aimless perambulations. But who can tell the dynasties, the genealogies that had bridged the interval? The red spider has no great use in the world, as far as I know. But he has every right to be there, and to enjoy the sun falling so warm on the stone. I wonder what he thinks about it all? For me, he has become the type of the patient, pretty fancies of nature, so persistently pursued, so void of moral, so deliciously fantastic and useless—but after all, what am I to talk of usefulness? Spider and man, man and spider—and to the pitying, tender mind of God, the brisk spider on his ledge, and the dull, wistful, middle-aged man who loiters looking about him, wondering and waiting, are much the same. He has a careful thought of each, I know:— To both alike the darkness and the day, The sunshine and the flowers, We draw sad comfort, thinking we obey A deeper will than ours. 28 _August 4, 1895._ [Sidenote: THE DAWN]