'Here come the Morning Spiders,
On their gossamer outriders!'
This time it was the Lamplighter flashing to and fro as he put the stars out one by one. He was in a frantic hurry; he extinguished whole groups of them at once. The Pleiades were the last to fade.
Rogers heard him and came back into himself. For his ecstasy had carried him even beyond the region of the freest 'thinking.' He could give no account or explanation of it at all. Monkey, Jimbo, Mother, and he raced in a line together for home and safety. Above the fields they met the spiders everywhere, the spiders that bring the dawn and ride off into the Star Cave on lost rays and stray thoughts that careless minds have left scattered about the world.
And the children, as they raced and told their mother to 'please move a little more easily and slipperily,' sang together in chorus:—
'We shall meet the Morning Spiders,
The fairy-cotton riders,
Each mounted on a star's rejected ray;
With their tiny nets of feather
They collect our thoughts together,
And on strips of windy weather
Bring the Day. …'
'That's stolen from you or Daddy,' Mother began to say to Rogers—but was unable to complete the flash. The thought lay loose behind her in the air.
A spider instantly mounted it and rode it off.
Something brushed her cheek. Riquette stood rover her, fingering her face with a soft extended paw.
'But it surely can't be time yet to get up!' she murmured. 'I've only just fallen asleep, it seems.' She glanced at her watch upon the chair beside the bed, saw that it was only four o'clock, and then turned over, making a space for the cat behind her shoulder. A tremendous host of dreams caught at her sliding mind. She tried to follow them. They vanished. 'Oh dear!' she sighed, and promptly fell asleep again. But this time she slept lightly. No more adventures came. She did not dream. And later, when Riquette woke her a second time because it was half-past six, she remembered as little of having been 'out' as though such a thing had never taken place at all.