Sometimes
again, a cross which we should have said was much too wide will have an
excellent effect. I did not anticipate, for example, that my saying
"chow" would have done much for the poor woman who had lost her daughter:
the cross did not seem wide enough: she was already, as I thought,
saturated with "chow." I can only account for the effect my application
of it produced by supposing the word to have derived some element of
strangeness and novelty as coming from a foreigner--just as land which
will give a poor crop, if planted with sets from potatoes that have been
grown for three or four years on this same soil, will yet yield
excellently if similar sets be brought from twenty miles off. For the
potato, so far as I have studied it, is a good-tempered, frivolous plant,
easily amused and easily bored, and one, moreover, which if bored, yawns
horribly.
I may say in passing that the tempers of plants have not been
sufficiently studied; and what little opinion we have formed about their
dispositions is for the most part ill formed. The sulkiest tree that I
know is the silver beech. It never forgives a scratch.--There is a tree
in Kensington gardens a little off the west side of the Serpentine with
names cut upon it as long ago as 1717 and 1736, which the tree is as
little able to forgive and forget as though the injury had been done not
ten years since.
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