ooked
upon. So I always called this fair visitor of ours Slacked Lime. I
think she is still living in a neighboring State, and I am sure she has
never forgotten the fanciful name I gave her. But within ten or a dozen
years I have seen this very same comparison going the round of the
papers, and credited to a Welsh poet, David Ap Gwyllym, or something like
that, by name.

--I turned a pretty sentence enough in one of my lectures about finding
poppies springing up amidst the corn; as if it had been foreseen by
nature that wherever there should be hunger that asked for food, there
would be pain that needed relief,--and many years afterwards. I had the
pleasure of finding that Mistress Piozzi had been beforehand with me in
suggesting the same moral reflection.

--I should like to carry some of my friends to see a giant bee-hive I
have discovered. Its hum can be heard half a mile, and the great white
swarm counts its tens of thousands. They pretend to call it a
planing-mill, but if it is not a bee-hive it is so like one that if a
hundred people have not said so before me, it is very singular that they
have not. If I wrote verses I would try to bring it in, and I suppose
people would start up in a dozen places, and say, "Oh, that bee-hive
simile is mine,--and besides, did not Mr. Bayard Taylor call the
snowflakes 'white bees'?"

I think the old Master had chosen these trivialities on purpose to amuse
the Young Astronomer and myself, if possible, and so make sure of our
keeping awake while he went on reading, as follows:

--How the sweet souls of all time strike the same note, the same because
it is in unison with the divine voice that sings to them! I read in the
Zend Avesta, "No earthly man with a hundred-fold strength speaks so much
evil as Mithra with heavenly strength speaks good. No earthly man with a
hundred-fold strength does so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength
does good."

And now leave Persia and Zoroaster, and come down with me to our own New
England and one of our old Puritan preachers. It was in the dreadful
days of the Salem Witchcraft delusion that one Jonathan Singletary, being
then in the prison at Ipswich, gave his testimony as to certain fearful
occurrences,--a great noise, as of many cats climbing, skipping, and
jumping, of throwing about of furniture, and of men walking in the
chambers, with crackling and shaking as if the house would fall upon him.

"I was at present," he says, "