"I am afraid not. Why do you ask?"
"Only, that I have suddenly discovered myself to be very ignorant, in a department of knowledge where it would be very pleasant as well as proper to be otherwise. I have been reading a book on some of the forms of life which are only to be known through the help of glasses; and I find there is a world there I know nothing about. That book has made a boy of me."
"How?" said Mrs. Caxton smiling.
"You think I always retain more or less of that character! Well—it has made me doubly a boy then; in my eagerness to put myself to school, on the one hand, and my desire to see something new on the other. Miss Powle, have you ever studied the invisible inhabitants of pools, and ponds, and sea-weeds?"
"Not at all," said Eleanor.
"You do not know much more than the names, then, of Infusoria,
Rotifera, and Pedunculata, and such things?"
"Not so much as the names—except Infusoria. I hope they are better than they sound."
"If the accounts are true—Mrs. Caxton, the world that we do not see, because of the imperfection of our organs, is even far more wonderful than the world that we do see. Perhaps it seems so, because of the finiteness of our own powers. But I never had a single thing give me such a view of the infinite glory of God, as one of the things detailed in that book—one of the discoveries of the microscope."
"His glory in creation," said Mrs. Caxton.
"More than that—There is to be sure the infiniteness of wisdom and of power, that makes your brain dizzy when you think of it; but there is an infinite moral glory also."