XLVIII. Happy is the man that loves flowers, - loves them for their own sakes, for their beauty, their associations, the joy they have given and always will give; so that he would sit down among them as friends and companions, if there were not another creature on earth to admire or praise them. He who does not appreciate floral beauty is to be pitied like any other man who is born imperfect. It is a misfortune not unlike blindness. But men who contemptuously reject flowers as effeminate and unworthy of manhood reveal a certain coarseness. Many persons lose all enjoyment of certain flowers by indulging false associations. There are people who think that no weed can be of interest as a flower. But all flowers are weeds where they grow wildly or abundantly; and somewhere our rarest flowers are somebody's commonest. Generally, also, there is a disposition to undervalue common flowers. There are few that will trouble themselves to examine minutely a blossom that they have seen and neglected from childhood; and yet, if they would but question such flowers, they would often be surprised to find extreme beauty where it had been long overlooked. - BEECHER. LVI. As the hackney-boat, which carries passengers from Leyden to Amsterdam, was putting off, a boy running along the side of the canal desired to be taken in, which the master of the boat refused, because the lad had not money enough to pay the usual fare. An eminent merchant being pleased with the looks of the boy, and secretly touched with compassion towards him, paid the money for him and ordered him to be taken on board. Upon talking with him afterward, he found that he could speak readily in three or four languages, and learned upon further examination that he had been stolen away when he was a child by a gypsy, and had rambled ever since with a gang of those strollers up and down several parts of Europe. It happened that the merchant, whose heart seems to have inclined toward the boy by a secret kind of instinct, had himself lost a child some years before. After a long search, the parents gave him up for drowned in one of the canals with which that country abounds; and the mother was so afflicted at the loss of her only son, that she died for grief of it. LIX. Upon laying together all particulars, and examining the several moles and marks by which the mother used to describe the child when he was first missing, the boy proved to be the son of the merchant whose heart had so unaccountably melted at the sight of him. The lad was very well pleased to find a father who was so rich, and likely to leave him a good estate; the father, on the other hand, was not a little delighted to see a son return to him, whom he had given up for lost, with such a strength of constitution, sharpness of understanding, and skill in languages. The young linguist, having received such extraordinary rudiments of an education, was afterward trained up in everything that becomes a gentleman; wearing off, little by little, all the vicious habits and practices that he had acquired in the course of his wanderings. Nay, it is said that he has since been employed in foreign courts upon national business, with great reputation to himself and honor to those who sent him, and that he has visited several countries as a public minister, in which he formerly wandered as a gypsy. - ADDISON. |