to re-fill it.

He might have found some to fill it for him no doubt. He lived amidst
the poor, and the poor to the poor are good, though they are bad and
bitter to the rich. But he did not open either his lips or his hand. He
consumed his heart in silence; and his vitals preyed in anguish on
themselves without his yielding to their torments.

He was a madman; and Cato, who measured the godliness of man by what
they gained, would have held him accursed;--the madness that starves and
is silent for an idea is an insanity, scouted by the world and the gods.
For it is an insanity unfruitful; except to the future. And for the
future who cares,--save these madmen themselves?

He watched the spider as it went.

It could not speak to him as its fellow once spoke in the old Scottish
story. To hear as that captive heard, the hearer must have hope, and a
kingdom,--if only in dreams.

This man had no hope; he had a kingdom indeed, but it was not of earth;
and, in an hour of sheer cruel bodily pain, earth alone has dominion and
power and worth.

The spider crawled across the grey wall; across the glow from the
vanished sun; across a coil of a dead passion-vine, that strayed loose
through the floor; across the classic shapes of a great cartoon drawn in
chalks upon the dull rugged surface of stone.

Nothing arrested it; nothing retarded it, as nothing hastened it. It
moved slowly on; fat, lustreless, indolent, hueless; reached at length
its den, and there squatted aloft, loving the darkness; its young
swarming around, its prey held in its forceps, its nets cast about.

Through the open casement there came on the rising wind of the storm,
in the light of the last lingering sunbeam, a beautiful night-moth,
begotten by some cruel hot-house heat in the bosom of some frail exiled
tropical flower.

It swam in on trembling pinions, and alighted on the golden head of a
gathered crocus that lay dying on the stones--a moth that should have
been born to no world save that of the summer world of a Midsummer
Night's Dream.

A shape of Ariel and Oberon; slender, silver, purple, roseate,
lustrous-eyed, and gossamer-winged.

A creature of woodland waters, and blossoming forests; of the yellow
chalices of kingcups and the white breasts of river lilies, of moonbeams
that strayed through a summer world of shadows, and dew-drops that
glistened in the deep folded hearts of roses. A creature to brush the
dreaming eyes of a poet, to nestle on