76 SUMMEE IN A BOG. 



sedges and rushes, and the water, shrunken and 

 hushed, steals along under a gray, portentous 

 sky. 



TOBACCO. 



"If," answered Mejnour, "a stranger had visited 

 a wandering tribe before one property of herbalism 

 was known to them; if he had told the savages that 

 the herbs, which ev^ry day they trampled under foot, 

 were endowed with the most potent virtues : that one 

 would restore to health a brother on the verge of 

 death ; that another would paralyze into idiotcy their 

 wisest sages; that a third would strike lifeless to the 

 dust their most stalwart champion; that tears and 

 laughter, vigor and disease, madness and reason, 

 wakefulness and sleep, existence and dissolution, 

 were coiled up in those unregarded leaves — ^would 

 they not have held him a sorcerer or a liar? To half 

 the virtues of the vegetable world mankind are yet in 

 the darkness of the savages I have supposed. There 

 are faculties within us with which certain herbs have 

 afl&nity and over which they have power. The moly 

 of the ancients is not all a fable." — Bulwer. 



We are apt to regard the earth beneath our 

 feet as subject to blind and meaningless chance. 

 What we call "natural causes" are placed in 

 a catalogue of events quite aside from those 

 which we designate as "providential." Per- 

 haps we do not understand Nature as well as 



