"I am not sorry for them," said Wilkinson; "they say that pest, the Canada thistle, came from the Old Country."
"Yes, that's true; and so did Pusley, which Warner compares with original sin; and a host of other plants. Why, on part of the Hamilton mountain you won't find a single native plant. It is perfectly covered, from top to bottom, with dusty, unwholesome-looking weeds from Europe and the Southern States. But we paid them back."
"How was that?"
"You know, a good many years ago, sailing vessels began to go from the Toronto harbour across the Atlantic to British ports. There's a little water-plant that grows in Ashbridge's Bay, called the Anacharis, and this little weed got on to the bottom of the ocean vessels. Salt water didn't kill it, but it lived till the ships got to the Severn, and there it fell off and took root, and blocked up the canals with a solid mass of subaqueous vegetation that made the English canal men dredge night and day to get rid of it. I tell you we've got some pretty hardy things out here in Canada."
"Do you not think," asked Wilkinson, "that our talk is getting too like that of Charles and his learned father in Gosse's 'Canadian Naturalist'?"
"All right, my boy, I'll oppress you no longer with a tender father's scientific lore, but, with your favourite poet, say:—
"To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."
"That is because of their associations, a merely relative reason," said the dominie.
"It isn't though, at least not altogether. Listen, now, to what Tennyson says, or to something like what he says:—