As large a proportion suppose, in good
faith, that a plant grows at the base of the stem, instead of at the
top: that is, if they see a young sapling in which there is a crotch
at five feet from the ground, they expect to see it ten feet from the
ground by-and-by,--confounding the growth of a tree with that of a man
or animal. But perhaps the best of us could hardly bear the severe test
unconsciously laid down by a small child of my acquaintance. The boy's
father, a college-bred man, had early chosen the better part, and
employed his fine faculties in rearing laurels in his own beautiful
nursery-gardens, instead of in the more arid soil of court-rooms or
state-houses. Of course the young human scion knew the flowers by name
before he knew his letters, and used their symbols more readily; and
after he got the command of both, he was one day asked by his younger
brother what the word _idiot_ meant,--for somebody in the parlor had
been saying that somebody else was an idiot. "Don't you know?" quoth
Ben, in his sweet voice: "an idiot is a person who doesn't know an
arbor-vitae from a pine,--he doesn't know anything.
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