There was a sharp crisp coldness as of lingering frost in the gloom and the dullness. Heavy clouds, as yet unbroken, hung over the cathedral and the clustering roofs around it in dark and starless splendor.
Over the great still plains which stretched eastward and southward, black with the furrows of the scarce-budded corn, the wind blew hard; blowing the river and the many streamlets spreading from it into foam; driving the wintry leaves which still strewed the earth thickly hither and thither in legions; breaking boughs that had weathered through the winter hurricanes, and 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 plow, 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 gray stone, dead and lusterless like the wall of a prison-house, over whose surface a spider as colorless as itself dragged slowly its crooked hairy limbs loaded with the moisture of the place; 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.