mushrooms.' The
mushroom, that is to say, has its roots away back in old rainstorms, in
fallen forests, and in ancient climatic experiences too subtle to
trace. I have been reading Dr. Cooke's text-book, and he and Mr.
Cuthill have convinced me that it takes about a million years to grow a
mushroom. The conditions out of which the fungus suddenly springs are
as old as the world itself. And that same consideration saves America
and Australia from contempt. For both America and Australia--these
mushroom nations--are very, very old. Dr. Stanley Hall, the President
of the Clark University, was speaking on this aspect of things the
other day. 'In a very pregnant psychological sense,' he said, 'ours is
an unhistoric land. Our very constitution had a Minerva birth.' (That
is a classical way of saying that it had a mushroom birth.) 'Our
literature, customs, fashions, institutions, and legislation were
inherited or copied, and our religion was not a gradual indigenous
growth, but both its spirit and its forms were imported ready-made from
Holland, Rome, England, and Palestine. No country is so precociously
old for its years.' It follows, therefore, that Australia is as old as
the Empire. And the Empire has its roots away back where the first man
delved. We must not allow ourselves to be duped by the trickery of
appearances. These new things are very ancient. 'How long did it take
you to paint that picture?' somebody asked Sir Joshua Reynolds. '_All
my life!_' he replied.

Anybody can grow fine flowers in the daytime. But what can you grow in
the dark? That is the challenge of the mushrooms--_what can you grow
in the dark_? 'The nights are the test!' as Charlotte Bronte used to
say. When things were as black as black could be, poor Charlotte
wrote: 'The days pass in a slow, dark march; the nights are the test;
the sudden wakings from restless sleep, the revived knowledge that one
sister lies in her grave, and another not at my side, but in a separate
and sick-bed. _The nights are the test_.' They are indeed. Tell me:
Can you grow faith, and restfulness, and patience, and a quiet heart in
the darkness? If so, you will never speak contemptuously of mushrooms
again.

Why, dear me, some of the very finest things in this world of ours
spring up suddenly, like the mushroom, and spring up in the dark! Dean
Hole used to tell how he became a preacher. For years he could not
lift his eyes from his manuscript.