Besides the precious drink the sun brought the most delicate food for the wheat.  There was carbonic acid, that makes soda water so delicious, besides oxygen, that is so stimulating, nitrogen, ammonia, and half a dozen other things that are so nutritious to growing plants.

Thus the wheat grew up in beauty, headed out abundantly, and matured perfectly.  Then the farmer stopped weeping for laughter, and in his joy he remembered to thank, not the sun, nor the wind, but the great One who made them both.

THE SUN’S GREAT HORSES

There was once a man who had thousands of acres of mighty forests in the distant mountains.  They were valueless there, but would be exceedingly valuable in the great cities hundreds of miles away, if he could only find any power to transport them thither.  So he looked for a team that could haul whole counties of forests so many miles.  He saw that the sun drew the greatest loads, and he asked it to help him.  And the sun said that was what he was made for; he existed only to help man.  He said that he had made those great forests to grow for a thousand years so as to be ready for man when he needed them, and that he was now ready to help move them where they were wanted.

So he told the man who owned the forest that there was a great power, which men called gravitation, that seemed to reside in the center of the earth and every other world, but that it worked everywhere.  It held the stones down to the earth, made the rain fall, and water to run down hill; and if the man would arrange a road, so that gravitation and the sun could work together, the forest would soon be transported from the mountains to the sea.

So the man made a trough a great many miles long, the two sides coming together like a great letter V. Then the sun brought water from the sea and kept the trough nearly full year after year.  The man put into it the lumber and logs from the great forests, and gravitation pulled the lumber and water ever so swiftly, night and day, miles away to the sea.

How I have laughed as I have seen that perpetual stream of lumber and timber pour out so far from where the sun grew them for man.  For the sun never ceased to supply the water, and gravitation never ceased to pull.

This man who relentlessly cut down the great forests never said, “How good the sun is!” nor, “How strong is gravitation!” but said continually, “How smart I am!”

OLD SUN HELP

Holland is a land that is said to draw twenty feet of water.  Its surface is below sea level.  Since 1440 they have been recovering land from the sea.  They have acquired 230,000 acres in all.  Fifty years ago they diked off 45,000 acres of an arm of the sea, called Haarlem Meer, that had an average depth of twelve and three quarters feet of water, and proposed to pump it out so as to have that much more fertile land.  They wanted to raise 35,000,000 tons of water a month a distance of ten feet, to get through in time.  Who could work the handle?