ed on the world
and its ways; and he too said, "Yes, dullness and heaviness win the day;
a fine exterior is what people care for nowadays." And then he began to
sing in his own peculiar way--and it is from his song that we have taken
this little piece of history, which may very possibly be all untrue,
although it does stand printed here in black and white.

[Illustration]

THE HAPPY FAMILY

THE largest green leaf in this country is certainly the burdock. Put one
in front of your waist, and it is just like an apron; or lay it upon
your head, and it is almost as good as an umbrella, it is so broad.

Burdock never grows singly; where you find one plant of the kind you may
be sure that others grow in its immediate neighborhood. How magnificent
they look!

And all this magnificence is food for snails--the great white snails,
which grand people in olden times used to have dished up as fricassees,
and of which, when they had eaten, they would say, "H'm, how nice!" for
they really fancied them delicious. These snails lived on burdock
leaves, and that was why burdock was planted.

Now there was an old estate where snails were no longer considered a
delicacy. The snails had therefore died out, but the burdock still
flourished. In all the alleys and in all the beds it had grown and
grown, so that it could no longer be checked; the place had become a
perfect forest of burdock.

Here and there stood an apple or plum tree to serve as a kind of token
that there had been once a garden, but everything, from one end of the
garden to the other, was burdock, and beneath the shade of the burdock
lived the last two of the ancient snails.

They did not know themselves how old they were, but they well remembered
the time when there were a great many of them, that they had descended
from a family that came from foreign lands, and that this forest in
which they lived had been planted for them and theirs. They had never
been beyond the limits of the garden, but they knew that there was
something outside their forest, called the castle, and that there one
was boiled, and became black, and was then laid upon a silver
dish--though what happened afterward they had never heard, nor could
they exactly fancy how it felt to be cooked and laid on a silver dish.
It was, no doubt, a fine thing, and exceedingly genteel.

Neither the cockchafer, nor the toad, nor the earthworm, all of whom
they questioned on the matter, could give the