“Yas’m,” said the girl; “but it is not the place where I do be that makes me vera homesick; it is the place where I don’t be.” (Text.)—Louis Albert Banks.
(1427)
HOMING INSTINCT, THE
The soul’s instinct toward the immortal life is like the instinct of these wasps:
Fabre, the wonderful French observer of wasps, experimented on them in regard to the matter of finding and knowing their holes, by carrying them away shut up in a dark box to the center of a village three kilometers from the nesting-ground, and releasing them after being kept all night in the dark boxes. These wasps when released in the busy town, certainly a place never visited by them before, immediately mounted vertically to above the roofs and then instantly and energetically flew south, which was the direction of their holes. Nine separate wasps, released one at a time, did this without a moment’s hesitation, and the next day Fabre found them all at work again at their hole-digging. He knew them by two spots of white paint he had put on each one.—Vernon L. Kellogg, “Insect Stories.”
(1428)
HONESTY
A merchant prince once pointed out a clerk in his employ to a friend, and said, “That young man is my banker. He alone has entire control of my finances. He could abscond with a hundred thousand dollars without my preventing it.” Seeing the friend’s evident disapproval at so great trust in one man, he continued, “I would trust him as I would my minister. He is absolutely honest; he could not steal.” And there are thousands of such men who have passed beyond temptation because of the ingrained, undisturbed integrity, acquired by a reverence for right and an early resolution to be true.—James T. White, “Character Lessons.”
(1429)