Page:Little Ellie and Other Tales (1850).djvu/80

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The Garden of Paradise.

them he could get information about every country and every people: but of where the Garden of Paradise was to be found, not a word was said; and that was the very thing he thought most of and most wished to know.

While the Prince was still quite a little boy, and just when he ought to have been sent to school, his grandmother told him that every flower in the Garden of Paradise was made of the sweetest cake, and its stamina of the choicest wine: on one plant grew history, on another geography, on a third the German language; so that one only need eat the cakes in order to know one’s lesson perfectly; and the more one ate the more one learned, and the more one understood of history, geography, or German.

At that time the young Prince believed all this; but by degrees, as he grew older and wiser, he saw very well that the glory of the Garden of Paradise must be a very different sort of thing.

“Oh, why did Eve pluck the fruit from

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