Out of this silver vessel, after a long, desperate, strangling cry,
which marked her first great lesson in the realities of life, the child
took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and their children get, tempered
with water, and sweetened a little, so as to bring it nearer the
standard established by the touching indulgence and partiality of
Nature,--who has mingled an extra allowance of sugar in the blameless
food of the child at its mother's heart, as compared with that of its
infant brothers and sisters of the bovine race.
But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rain-water. An air-plant
will grow by feeding on the winds. Nay, those huge forests that
overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from the
air-currents with which they are always battling. The oak is but a
foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that holds
the future vegetable world in solution. The storm that tears its leaves
has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the tornado clad in the
spoils of a hundred hurricanes.
Poor little Iris! What had she in common with the great oak in the
shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like
that,--this was all.
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