Lesson of the Whitlow Grass 
disease of the finger joints. It is not really a grass, but a 
pigmy member of the hot-blooded family of the mustards. 
Some of its distant relatives are of a habit of growth so 
robust in comparison with the minute seeds from which 
they spring that the mustard seed, as we know, has been 
used in the Divine teaching to typify the development of 
the heavenly nature from the seed of the Kingdom im¬ 
planted in the human heart. It is not given our little 
mustard, the whitlow grass, to produce branches in which 
the fowls of the air can lodge, yet in its humble way it 
would seem to have a lesson to teach in Christian living. 
Look the open blossom full in the face, and you will see 
that its four petals are so set as to form a cross. So is 
the plants cheery daily life under the cross a type of the 
Christian disciple’s day, which also, in proportion to the 
reality of his discipleship, is a day of cross-bearing. And 
just as amid the flowers the seed vessels grow and ripen, 
so is the Christian’s cross not barren, but ever fruitful in 
good deeds. 
March 24. —These last days of March Mother Nature 
is bustling about the woods waking up her plant children, 
stripping the covers from their snug winter beds and expos¬ 
ing the sleepy little buds to the chill morning air in the 
most hard-hearted way imaginable. On the warm slopes 
hepaticas in blue and white have been up for a week mak¬ 
ing pollen, much to the gratification, doubtless, of sundry 
small bugs and bees and palpitating butterflies, which the 
sun lately lured abroad, and which may now be seen dis¬ 
tractedly flying this way and that in nervous endeavor to 
solve the never-ending problem of what to eat and where 
to get it. 
[25] 
