waiting the return of the tide. But when the tide comes and strikes the pebbles not a drop of the water enters them, thousands of years they have rolled up and down there, wearing smoother and growing more impervious all the time. But at the first touch of the incoming tide the sponges drink themselves full.
There is the same difference in men.
Tides of spiritual influence flow around
some men and they keep growing
harder—the same tides fill and transform
others.
(1557)
See Testimony of Nature.
IMPRESSIONS, EARLY
The things children most quickly note and in which they take most interest may indicate their bent of mind and help parents and instructors to shape their education along lines of least resistance. Thus R. H. Haweis says:
"Long before I had ever touched a violin
I was fascinated with its appearance. In
driving to town as a child—when, standing
up in the carriage, I could just look out of
the window—certain fiddle-shops hung with
mighty rows of violoncellos attracted my attention.
I had dreams of these large editions—these
patriarchs of the violin, as they
seemed to me. I compared them in my mind
with the smaller tenors and violins. I
dreamed about their brown, big, dusty bodies
and affable good-natured-looking heads and
grinning faces. These violin shops were
the great points watched for on each journey
up to London from Norwood, where I spent
my early days."
(1558)
Impressions Permanent—See Teachers' Function, The.
Impression, Vivid—See Reminder,
Severe.
IMPRISONED LIVES
In the Persian desert the sad sight may
be seen of brick pillars in which many an
unfortunate victim has been walled up alive,
as a horrible method of inflicting capital
punishment. Some awful tales of cruelties
perpetrated here are told. The victim is
put into the pillar, which is half built up
in readiness, then, if merciful, the executioner
will cement quickly up to the face,
when death comes speedily; but sometimes
the torture is prolonged, and the inmate has
been heard groaning and calling for water
for three days.
How many lives are walled lives—built
around and bricked in by torturing
limitations that suffocate joy and
hope, and are no more than a lingering
death!
(1559)
IMPROVED CONDITIONS
In a district of Glasgow where the death-rate
used to be forty in a thousand, sanitation
has brought it down to twenty-eight,
and it has been brought down to seventeen
or eighteen in some parts of London. Boston
reduced its death-rate from thirty-one
to twenty, and Croydon, Eng., from twenty-eight
to thirteen. Even the friction-match
has had its share in prolonging life. "Doubtless
many a fatal pneumonia and pleurisy
has been contracted when the luckless house-*holder's
lire had died out overnight, and
he was struggling with flint, steel and tinder-*box."
In London during the last century
nearly two hundred thousand persons perished
of smallpox. Macaulay says that a
person without a pitted face was the exception.
But, thanks largely to vaccination,
in a recent year there were only fourteen
cases of smallpox among New York's inhabitants,
and in the German army, where
vaccination is compulsory, the dread disease
has been eradicated. The production of pure
water by distillation has done much to
abolish alimentary diseases among sailors
at sea, and lime-juice defends them from
scurvy. When the first emigrant ships went
out to Australia, one-third of the passengers
perished on the voyage, but when the
ship-owners were forced to alter their terms
and receive pay only for those they landed
safely, the death-rate became smaller than
when these same persons were living upon
shore. In Queen Elizabeth's time, one in
two thousand of her London subjects was
murdered annually. At the same rate there
would be 2,500 murders every year in London
now, whereas the number is no more
than twelve. This is what the lighter street
and a more efficient police have done for
the British metropolis. Facts like these are
a most wholesome and agreeable corrective
for the lament over the departure of the
"good old times," so much affected by the
cynic and the pessimist.—Boston Journal.
(1560)
