scattering the tender blossoms of the snowdrops and the
earliest crocuses in all the little moss-grown garden ways.

The smell of wet grass, of the wood-born violets, of trees whose new
life was waking in their veins, of damp earths turned freshly upwards by
the plough, were all blown together by the riotous breezes.

Now and then a light gleamed through the gloom where a little peasant
boy lighted home with a torch some old priest on his mule, or a boat
went down the waters with a lamp hung at its prow. For it grew dark
early, and people used to the river read a threat of a flood on its
face.

A dim glow from the west, which was still tinged with the fire of the
sunset, fell through a great square window set in a stone building, and
striking across the sicklier rays of an oil lamp reached the opposing
wall within.

It was a wall of grey stone, dead and lustreless like the wall of a
prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colourless as itself
dragged slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the
place, which was an old tower, of which the country folk told strange
tales, where it stood among the rushes on the left bank of the stream.

A man watched the spider as it went.

It crept on its heavy way across the faint crimson reflection from the
glow of the sunken sun.

It was fat, well-nourished, lazy, content; its home of dusky silver hung
on high, where its pleasure lay in weaving, clinging, hoarding,
breeding. It lived in the dark; it had neither pity nor regret; it
troubled itself neither for the death it dealt to nourish itself, nor
for the light without, into which it never wandered; it spun and throve
and multiplied.

It was an emblem of the man who is wise in his generation; of the man
whom Cato the elder deemed divine; of the Majority and the Mediocrity
who rule over the earth and enjoy its fruits.

This man knew that it was wise; that those who were like to it were wise
also: wise with the holy wisdom which is honoured of other men.

He had been unwise--always; and therefore he stood watching the sun die,
with hunger in his soul, with famine in his body.

For many months he had been half famished, as were the wolves in his own
northern mountains in the winter solstice. For seven days he had only
been able to crush a crust of hard black bread between his teeth. For
twenty hours he had not done even so much as this. The trencher on his
tressel was empty; and he had not wherewithal