Leaves are such common things that most people do not know how beautiful they are. From what I have told you about them, I think you will always be ready to examine them, and see what a variety of beauty there is in the leaves of different trees and plants. And when you think what is done in the leaves, and how the sap comes continually to them to be aired, you admire them more than they do who think of them merely as pretty green things.
Think of a leaf as made, for growing is making. No one can make leaves but God. But suppose that a man could make leaves and put them on a tree. It would take him his whole life to cover a tree of any size with leaves. But God, as I have told you, makes the leaves out of sap on all the plants and trees. He sends to them the warm breezes of spring, and sets the sap running in the pipes, and then the buds come out, and from them are formed the leaves. What a busy workshop, as you may say, is every plant and tree in the spring when all the leaves are making!
I have told you about the wonderful change that we see in plants and trees year by year. What multitudes of leaves and flowers fall to the ground every year and decay! What a waste, as it seems, of beautiful things! But are they really wasted? Oh no! God, as I have told you, can make again from these decayed leaves and flowers other leaves and flowers just as beautiful as these once were.
Changes in winter and spring.
How wonderful this is! Look out in summer, and see on trees, and shrubs, and plants, flowers of every color mingled with the green leaves. What a world of varied beauty you behold! You can not believe that all this will be soon gone. But wait a little and there are no leaves nor flowers. All is bare and dreary. The leaves and flowers have fallen in all their beauty, and the snow covers them as with a winding-sheet.
“Seed-time and harvest shall not cease.”
Is it possible that all this beauty that we have seen thus buried can be revived again? Will the green grass again appear? Will these bare trees and shrubs again be covered with leaves and blossoms, and will the flowers again spring up? Oh yes! We have seen God do all this year after year, with the sunshine, and the rain, and the dew of spring; and he will do it again, for he has said that “seed-time and harvest shall not cease.”
Questions.—With what thoughts and feelings will what you have learned in this book make you look at plants and trees? What is said about the weeping-willow? What about flowers and fruits? What about leaves? What is said about leaves being made? What is said of the change that you see every year in plants and trees? Tell about the change from summer to winter, and then from winter to summer.
THE END.