1i8 UNOPENED PARCELS.

My father smiled. “If that puzzles you,
Honor, bring me a» walnut. We had some at
dessert.”

I did so, and, after splitting it neatly in two,
he showed me the tiny pear-shaped germ lying
in a tiny hollow between the two halves at the
lower end.

“Tf I were to tell you that every time you eat
a common walnut you eat a walnut-tree complete,
you would laugh at me, I suppose, Honor ; and yet
you eat what might have been a walnut-tree, had
you not interfered. Yes! there in that tiny germ
are all the specific walnut-tree materials, wanting
nothing to bring their life into activity, but com-
mon earth, common water, common air, and com-
mon sunshine—things, all of them, so common that
we do not trouble ourselves to ask what they do
for us ; and yet they effect what we should call
miracles, were they not so common! So in their
hands that minikin germ would develop into a big
tree, —aye, and a walnut-tree, and no other sort
—its bark, its wood, its leaves, its sap, its flowers,
its fruit, the seed within itself after its kind.