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tons, by shiploads, peas passed through the markets, and travelled 
across all seas to every land. A vast acreage of green England 
belonged to the fairy “ Peablossom.” _ A good pea harvest meant pros- 
perity, plenty, wealth to the few, and work for the many. A failure in 
the pea crop was poverty, desolation, ruin. And no wonder, for the 
pea was the chosen food of ancient and modern, of rich and poor, of 
man and beast. ; 
On some plant of the pea kind Daniel and his companions 
lived, when their glorious Hebrew faces out-matched the flower of 
Persia. On peas poor Monmouth tried to feed, when the bloodhounds 
were on his trail. The nobleman gave a labourers’ annual house rent 
for green peas at Christmas, and the beggar asked for pea soup at the 
Workhouse. Peas formed a large element of the Navy’s food, and 
they nerved the arms that fought at Copenhagen and Trafalgar. Well 
might they do so, for in this little globe was contained a larger amount 
of flesh than in a similar bulk of “The roast beef of old England.” 
Art could not compose, Nature had not produced, so much food in so 
little compass as in this pea, and its relation the bean. But what was 
it that we gobbled so recklessly? What, indeed! This seed con- 
tained a study too long for human life,a secret too deep for human 
science. There was a /éfe within this pea. If he struck it with a 
hammer it separated in two halves, just as Moore’s “ heart indignant 
broke to show,” in a truly Irish manner, “ that still it lived.” This 
pea split its sides from pride of birth, proving itself thereby one of 
the great family of double-seeded plants, not a connection of the down- 
trodden grass or awkward cactus, but a relation of the forest trees and 
the British oak itself. And no mean relation, for there were peas in 
America which bore pods a yard long, and twisted round large trees 
till they strangled them. 
If this little seed were placed in the warm ground, and the dews 
of heaven were allowed to fall upon it, the skin that covered it would 
draw aside as gently as ever mother drew a counterpane off her 
sleeping infant ; the two lobes would open, and two matvellous intel- 
ligences would pursue their way—one upwards, one downwards ; one 
armed with a point shaped like a lady’s thimble, hard and pointed as 
a lady’s needle, flexible and thin as a lady’s thread, and sensitive as a 
lady’s finger, pushing its way through the hardest clods; and one 
green and beautiful, throwing out slender leaves, and taking hold with 
tendril fingers of some dry old stick, henceforth a thing of beauty, 
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