uld be. Some of the eastern natives told the visitors that in
each pod grew a little lamb with soft, white fleece. Orientals were
very ignorant in those days. The Tartars went even farther and said the
lamb bent the stalk he lived on down to the ground and ate all the food
within reach; and when he had nibbled up all the grass and roots around
him he died, and then it was that people took his fleece and twisted it
into thread, which was woven into garments. Thus the legend became
established and the belief in the Tartary lamb became so firm that for
several hundred years people even in England thought that in the Far
East there grew this wonderful plant with a vegetable lamb sprouting
from the top of it."

"How silly of them!" sniffed Carl.

"No sillier than lots of the things we now believe, probably," replied
his mother. "Aren't we constantly discovering how mistaken some of our
cherished beliefs were? That is what progress is. We learn continually
to cast aside outgrown notions and adopt wiser and better ones. So it
was in the past. The world was very young in those days, you must
remember, and people did not know so much about it as we do now. And
even we, with all our wisdom, are going to be laughed at years hence,
precisely as you are laughing now about those who believed the story of
the Tartary lamb. Men are going to say: '_Think of those poor, stupid
old things back in nineteen hundred and twenty-three who believed
so-and-so! How could they have done it?_'"

Carl was silent.

"When you consider this you will understand how it was that the eager
readers of the past devoured with wide-open eyes the tale-telling of
Sir John Mandeville; and should you ever read that ancient story, as I
hope you will sometime, you will be less surprised to hear that even he
declared that he had seen cotton growing and that when the pod of the
plant was cut open inside it was a little creature like a lamb. The
natives of the East ate both the fruit of the plant and the wee beast,
he explained. In fact he said he had eaten the thing himself."

"Why, the very idea!" gasped Mary.

"What a lie!" Carl burst out.

"I'm afraid Sir John was either not very truthful or he had a great
imagination," smiled Mrs. McGregor. "Still, you see, he was not alone
in his belief about the Tartary lamb. So many other people believed the
yarn that he probably thought he was telling the truth. And as for
eating it--well, he just had a strain of Jack