ROOT CONNECTION
To-day I have been transplanting magnolia-trees. There is one that stands among the earliest I planted, twenty years ago, and now it is a vast ball of white. I suppose five hundred thousand magnificent cups are exhaling thanksgiving to God after the long winter has passed. Now, no man need tell me that the root that nestles in the ground is as handsome or smells as sweet as these vases in the air; but I should like to know what would become of all these white cups in the air if the connection between those dirt-covered roots and the blossoms should be cut to-night. The root is the prime provider, and there can be no life and no blossom where there is no root connection.—Henry Ward Beecher.
(2790)
ROTE VERSUS REASON
Soon after I had left school—and when I was a freshman at college—I made the acquaintance of a young man of about my own age who possest a most marvelous memory, while he also showed most marvelous mental density. He had occasion to pass examination in Euclid, as we all of us did at the university at those times, and one would have said that he would have been singularly successful in these examinations, for, tho he had only read through our college Euclid once, he could recite or write out the whole of it; or, if preferred, he could begin at any point where one might start him and reproduce any quantity verbatim et literatim—atque punctuatim—so far as that was concerned. But not only was he utterly unable to understand a word of it all, he had not even brains enough to keep his real ignorance of Euclid to himself. He was always forgetting the good old rule ne quid nimis, and as he did not know where to stop in his marvelous recitations, the examiners naturally came to the conclusion, perfectly justified by the facts, that he knew his Euclid by heart, but knew nothing about geometry.—Richard A. Proctor, New York Mail and Express.
(2791)
ROUTINE
Commenting on the well-known dislike of the late Russell Sage for vacations, Forest and Stream says: “An office dig who digs voluntarily is as uneasy and as unhappy on a holiday as were those Pennsylvania mine mules which, on the occasion of the coal strike, were for the first time in many years lifted to the surface and turned out into the green fields in the sunlight. The poor creatures were in actual pain until they got back again into the darkness and the close atmosphere in the mine. The trouble with them was, that their whole nature as surface-dwellers had been supplanted by the attributes common to moles and the blind fishes of Mammoth Cave, and they could not stand in the open air and the light. So with a human being under the obsession of inordinate money-getting. The loss of time is only one component of the restlessness which attacks him after he gets away from the rut. His nature has become so molded and restricted to the ruling passion that he has lost capacity for finding employment in other things, least of all in vacation surroundings and vacation ways.”
(2792)
ROYALTY