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118 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. "If I were to tell you that every time yod eat a common walnut you eat a wal'nut-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 common earth, common water, common air, and common 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.