the cross did not seem wide enough: she was already, as I thought,
saturated with "chow." I can only account for the effect my application
of it produced by supposing the word to have derived some element of
strangeness and novelty as coming from a foreigner--just as land which
will give a poor crop, if planted with sets from potatoes that have been
grown for three or four years on this same soil, will yet yield
excellently if similar sets be brought from twenty miles off. For the
potato, so far as I have studied it, is a good-tempered, frivolous plant,
easily amused and easily bored, and one, moreover, which if bored, yawns
horribly.

I may say in passing that the tempers of plants have not been
sufficiently studied; and what little opinion we have formed about their
dispositions is for the most part ill formed. The sulkiest tree that I
know is the silver beech. It never forgives a scratch.--There is a tree
in Kensington gardens a little off the west side of the Serpentine with
names cut upon it as long ago as 1717 and 1736, which the tree is as
little able to forgive and forget as though the injury had been done not
ten years since. And the tree is not an aged tree either.

CALONICO. (FROM CHAPTER V. OF ALPS AND SANCTUARIES.)

Our inventions increase in geometrical ratio. They are like living
beings, each one of which may become parent of a dozen others--some good
and some ne'er-do-weels; but they differ from animals and vegetables
inasmuch as they not only increase in a geometrical ratio, but the period
of their gestation decreases in geometrical ratio also. Take this matter
of Alpine roads for example. For how many millions of years was there no
approach to a road over the St. Gothard, save the untutored watercourses
of the Ticino and the Reuss, and the track of the bouquetin or the
chamois? For how many more ages after this was there not a mere
shepherd's or huntsman's path by the river-side--without so much as a log
thrown over so as to form a rude bridge? No one would probably have ever
thought of making a bridge out of his own unaided imagination, more than
any monkey that we know of has done so. But an avalanche or a flood once
swept a pine into position and left it there; on this a genius, who was
doubtless thought to be doing something very infamous, ventured to make
use of it. Another time a pine was found nearly across the stream, but
not quite; and not quite, again, in the place where i