NATUBE-STUDY. xxiii 



I once knew a boy who went one evening with his 

 mother to call on the minister. Shy and awkward, he 

 sat in the corner and had every kind of a thought except 

 a religious one, and wished himself at the bottom of the 

 sea rather than where he was. Presently he became con- 

 scious, in a lull in the conversation, of a beckoning finger, 

 and of a kind voice that said, "Come over here; I want 

 to show you something." The boy, in all his twelve 

 years of life, had never even heard of a microscope. A 

 pocket-lens was an unknown quantity. To him the abil- 

 ity in a bit of curved glass to "make things big" was 

 what Emerson once said of God, "the x in the problem." 

 It was no more, for he had never even heard of it. The 

 minister lit the lamp, and with a bit of lichen-covered 

 bark in one hand, and a pocket-lens in the other he said, 

 "What do you think of that?" The thoughts are not 

 recorded, but the light blazed from mountain peaks, and 

 fainted in soft shadows as transparent as nature alone 

 can make shadows, and which the artist tries in vain to 

 imitate; dark caverns seemed to burrow into gloomy 

 depths ; diamonds sparkled on the heights, and dimly 

 gleamed in the depths of gray valleys; green particles 

 seemed a velvety lawn across which suddenly sauntered, 

 from a shadowy glen, a mighty beast, unknown even in 

 the boy's dreams, a beast with many legs, with terrible 

 horns that waved and threatened. It was stupendous, 

 yet it was nothing but a double convex lens, a dry lichen, 

 a good man, an ignorant boy, the lamplight and a plant 

 louse. But it waked up the boy, and to-day he stands 

 an equal among botanists who have investigated and 

 written ; he bends his back and strains his eyes every 

 night of his life over his microscope, with which he has 

 made discoveries, and with whose help he has written 



