“A challenge!” cried Mozart. “Prove your word.”
He yielded his place at the piano.
His excitement rose as Haydn reached the disputed passage, when, to his amazement, the composer brought his nose to the keyboard, and the notes rang out clear and true.
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INGRATITUDE
On the plains and along the broad bottoms of the Missouri River are the colonies—often a community of many members, with villages of wide extent—of the American marmots, or prairie-dogs. Merry, cheery, chipper little fellows these gregarious villagers sit on the mound above or beside the open door that leads to their comfortable subterranean dwellings, and hold converse in short not unmusical barks, each greeting his neighbor and rejoicing in the sunshine. But into the sanctity of the home which he and his have constructed with much labor, the burrowing owl comes, uninvited, and becomes a tenant with a life lease, without so much as “by your leave”; and one of the most atrocious results of this swindling arrangement is that the dog (a strict vegetarian) finds that the owl, whose young shares the nest with the infant marmots, feeds upon them and rears its young upon the bodies of the children of its victimized landlord.—Mrs. M. J. Gorton, Popular Science News.
(1617)
INHERITED PECULIARITIES
No study is more fascinating than the study of the laws of heredity. When a baby is born almost the first question is, “Whom does he resemble?” For months and years friends peer into the child’s face to discover, if possible, the family likeness. It has its mother’s eyes or its father’s mouth. If no marked resemblance can be found, the comment is, “How singular that this child is unlike every one in the family.” Resemblance is strange, but the absence of it, is more strange. A physical feature appears and reappears for generations. A delicate ear, looking like a translucent shell, is exactly reproduced. In some instances a generation is skipt, and then the likeness comes out again. A faded portrait or a medallion two hundred years old is brought to light, and in it you see the young man who stands by your side looking at it. Appetite for strong drink is found to exist in a whole family. Many a son inherits from his father tastes which almost inevitably produce the habit of intemperance. One of the most fearful woes of drunkenness is that it is entailed, and may become more terrible in the son than it was in the father. Strong animal passions predominate in some families, so that the sins of the fathers are repeated in the sons and grandsons. The expressions “good blood,” and “bad blood,” bear testimony to these well-known laws. In view of these facts, the questions we ask are in substance the questions of the disciples, “Where does the responsibility rest? Is there any blame? Is there any release? What does the religion of Jesus Christ say to these undeniable facts? Can it do anything to change them?” Upon us, as we are, with our natural and inherited characteristics, Christ performs His saving work. And it is matter of common observation, as undeniable as the facts of which we have been thinking, that those who truly become the servants of Christ are changed in this very respect, that they obtain genuine control over their inherited faults.—George Harris, Andover Review.
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