Nature-notes and impressions : in prose and verse / by Madison Cawein [electronic text]

The huge yellow spider, the writing-spider, in hot, weedy places, strident with the stinging music of the weed-bugs; and the corpulent red spider, with its big abdomen; and the angular black spider, ungainly and humped of back, enameled, as it were, with white, a porcelain-backed horror, spin their webs across the open paths of the woods, patiently awaiting the arrival of prey, some wood-fly, gnat, moth, wasp, or grasshopper, hurrying or lumbering blindly along that entangles itself in their nets.

How they remind me of that horrible humanity that lairs in our

large cities and spreads its snares for the destruction of the innocent, the unsuspecting! whose ruined or dead remnants are found lying in the street or in some alley-way, unrecognizable, by some early riser, as this insect, this burnished beetle is found by me stretched, a mere shell, in a corner of this web.