Thomas K. Beecher tells a story of finding his father’s old fiddle in the garret, where on a rainy day he had taken some children to play. It was all covered with dust and had only one string. And Mr. Beecher held it up to the children and told them how he used to hear his father play on it the old tunes, “Merrily, Oh,” and “Pompey Ducklegs.”
Of course, they cried “Play on it. Play the old tunes.” “I can not,” he said, “for it has only one string.” When he tried it he could only pick out with three notes a tune. Then he said, “If it had two strings, I could play six tunes, and if it had not only a G string, but a D string and an A string, and an E string, I could play all the tunes. You can not play real music with one string.”—N. McGee Waters.
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Stress and Storm Gains—See [Adversity].
Striving—See [Strain, Nervous].
STRONG AND WEAK
The idea of the big ones swallowing up the little ones, or the idea of the trusts, is not by any means confined to land, as we may see from reading the following:
As the sea covers three-fifths of the surface of the globe, its fauna is similarly greater than the living forms on land. When a naturalist inspects a little pool not larger than a billiard-table which is filled by the splashing waves of the Mediterranean, he finds it teeming with more varied and busy forms of life than can be found in a square mile of ordinary land. But in all that living marine world there is not a trace of goodness! All fishes are murderers and cannibals, and as in fresh water big trout relish eating small trout, so, in the wider waters of the ocean, wo to the small fry when a larger father or brother catches sight of them!
Science has boldly penetrated these dark, still abysses and finds that they abound with life. But such life! Many of the abysmal forms have large, movable jaws with rows of teeth all pointing backward, making escape impossible when once any creature is caught by them. The scientists of the Challenger were once puzzled to make out what a thing was which came up in their trawl, until it proved to be a fish caught by a smaller fish who was swallowed by its larger brother by gradually pulling itself glove fashion over its victim by means of barbed teeth—somewhat like a child being slowly swallowed alive by a large expanding toad. In those black depths some forms have phosphorescent lights not unlike burglars’ dark-lanterns, with which to hunt their prey.
Only among those animals which originally used to tread the solid earth and then took to the sea, like the whale, seal, and walrus, is there any sign of any falling off in all-devouring selfishness; these are mammals, and hence show affection for their young. But they live where they have to encounter the hideous swordfish, or their own relative who has been transformed into the cruel grampus, and so must fight for life.—W. Hanna Thomson, M.D., Everybody’s.