“Splendid!” I cried, and excusing ourselves, we scampered away up the stairs.
Tom went to work at once among the dictionaries and encyclopedias in a business-like way which impressed me immensely. The great volumes seemed to possess no terrors nor mysteries for him, but stood ready to yield up their secrets to his touch. It reminded me of the cave of the Forty Thieves—it was no trouble at all to get in, if one just knew how.
“Of course,” he pointed out, “the first thing is to find out everything we can about the rose of Sharon. That’s the keystone of the arch, as it were. So we’ll begin there.”
At the end of half an hour we had achieved the following result:
1.—Rose of Sharon—an ornamental malvaceous shrub. In the Bible the name is used for some flower not yet identified; perhaps a narcissus, or possibly the great lotus flower.—Webster’s Dictionary.
2.—Rose of Sharon—(a) in Scrip. Cant. II. 1, the autumn crocus; (b) a St. John’s wort; (c) same as althea.—The Century Dictionary.
3.—The Rose of Sharon—(a) a variety of apple; (b) a variety of plum; (c) a kind of early potato.
“Well,” observed Dick, disgustedly, when we had got this far, “the farther we go, the more we seem to get tangled up! Even these dictionary fellows don’t agree with each other.”
“They seldom do,” said Tom, with a wisdom born of experience. “All you can do, usually, is to average up what they say and reach your own conclusion. But wait a minute. Suppose we look up the Bible verse ourselves.”
“What is ‘Cant.’?” queried Dick. “I don’t know any book of the Bible called that, or anything like it.”