vider, and there can be no life and no blossom where there is no root connection.—Henry Ward Beecher.
(2790)
ROTE VERSUS REASON
Soon after I had left school—and when I was a freshman at college—I made the acquaintance of a young man of about my own age who possest a most marvelous memory, while he also showed most marvelous mental density. He had occasion to pass examination in Euclid, as we all of us did at the university at those times, and one would have said that he would have been singularly successful in these examinations, for, tho he had only read through our college Euclid once, he could recite or write out the whole of it; or, if preferred, he could begin at any point where one might start him and reproduce any quantity verbatim et literatim—atque punctuatim—so far as that was concerned. But not only was he utterly unable to understand a word of it all, he had not even brains enough to keep his real ignorance of Euclid to himself. He was always forgetting the good old rule ne quid nimis, and as he did not know where to stop in his marvelous recitations, the examiners naturally came to the conclusion, perfectly justified by the facts, that he knew his Euclid by heart, but knew nothing about geometry.—Richard A. Proctor, New York Mail and Express.
(2791)
ROUTINE
Commenting on the well-known dislike of
the late Russell Sage for vacations, Forest and Stream says: "An office dig who digs
voluntarily is as uneasy and as unhappy on
a holiday as were those Pennsylvania mine
mules which, on the occasion of the coal
strike, were for the first time in many years
lifted to the surface and turned out into the
green fields in the sunlight. The poor creatures
were in actual pain until they got back
again into the darkness and the close atmosphere
in the mine. The trouble with
them was, that their whole nature as surface-dwellers
had been supplanted by the attributes
common to moles and the blind
fishes of Mammoth Cave, and they could
not stand in the open air and the light. So
with a human being under the obsession of
inordinate money-getting. The loss of time
is only one component of the restlessness
which attacks him after he gets away from
the rut. His nature has become so molded
and restricted to the ruling passion that he
has lost capacity for finding employment in
other things, least of all in vacation surroundings
and vacation ways."
(2792)
ROYALTY
Where was the real royalty as between the two individuals mentioned in this historic incident?
It was arranged by his friends that Doctor
Morrison should be presented to George IV
that he might bestow a copy of the Chinese
Bible upon His Majesty. Who would not
have liked to witness the interview! On the
throne sat "the handsomest prince in Christendom,
the finest gentleman of Europe" (so
his courtiers told him), but whom Thackeray
dubs "a monstrous image of pride, vanity and
weakness," who had lived sixty-two years
and done nothing but invent a shoe-buckle;
who had spent hundreds of thousands, nay,
millions, on mere sensual gratification. Fifty
thousand dollars a year, we are told, it took
to clothe that royal back. Before His
Gracious Majesty stood the son of a farmhand,
Robert Morrison, twenty years his
junior, who had lived simply and given
largely; who had found out a useful thing
to do, and had worked at it so faithfully
that he had raised himself to be the equal
of the greatest man in the realm.
Robert bent the knee and presented the Chinese Bible to his sovereign, which gift His Imperial Highness was pleased to accept. But it is to be feared that His Imperial Highness' morals were no more benefited by the Chinese than by the English version.
(2793)
Royalty, Spirit of—See Christian Spirit, The.
Royalty Unrecognized—See Bargain-making.
Royalty's Kindness—See Appreciation.
Rubbish—See Value in Rubbish.
Rudeness, Reaction of—See Retaliation.
Ruin, Spiritual—See Neglected Lives.
RUINS UTILIZED
A news item from Gainesville, Fla., says:
English and Eastern capitalists have
bought a site here and it is said will invest
$2,000,000 in mills for the manufacture of
