“Yes, that’s true; and so did Pusley, which Warner compares with original sin; and a host of other plants.  Why, on part of the Hamilton mountain you won’t find a single native plant.  It is perfectly covered, from top to bottom, with dusty, unwholesome-looking weeds from Europe and the Southern States.  But we paid them back.”

“How was that?”

“You know, a good many years ago, sailing vessels began to go from the Toronto harbour across the Atlantic to British ports.  There’s a little water-plant that grows in Ashbridge’s Bay, called the Anacharis, and this little weed got on to the bottom of the ocean vessels.  Salt water didn’t kill it, but it lived till the ships got to the Severn, and there it fell off and took root, and blocked up the canals with a solid mass of subaqueous vegetation that made the English canal men dredge night and day to get rid of it.  I tell you we’ve got some pretty hardy things out here in Canada.”

“Do you not think,” asked Wilkinson, “that our talk is getting too like that of Charles and his learned father in Gosse’s ’Canadian Naturalist’?”

“All right, my boy, I’ll oppress you no longer with a tender father’s scientific lore, but, with your favourite poet, say:—­

     “To me the meanest flower that blows can give
     Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”

“That is because of their associations, a merely relative reason,” said the dominie.

“It isn’t though, at least not altogether.  Listen, now, to what Tennyson says, or to something like what he says:—­

     Little flower in the crannied wall,
     Peeping out of the crannies,
     I hold you, root and all, in my hand;
     Little flower, if I could understand
     What you are, root and all, and all in all,
     I should know what God and man is.

There’s no association nor relation in that; the flower brings you at once face to face with infinite life.  Do you know what these strawberries brought to me?”

“A pleasant feast I should say.”

“No, they made me think how much better it would have been if I had had somebody to gather them for; I don’t say a woman, because that’s tabooed between us, but say a child, a little boy or girl.  There’s no association or relation there at all; the strawberries called up love, which is better than a pleasant feast.”

“According to Wordsworth, the flower in the crannied wall and the strawberry teach the same lesson, for does he not say:—­

     That life is love and immortality.

* * * * *

     Life, I repeat, is energy of love,
     Divine or human, exercised in pain,
     In strife and tribulation, and ordained,
     If so approved and sanctified, to pass
     Through shades and silent rest, to endless joy?

At any rate, that is what he puts into his Parson’s lips.

“Farquhar, my boy, I think we’d better stop, for I’m weakening fast.  It’s sentimental the flowers and the fruit are making me.  I mind, when I was a little fellow in the old sod, my mother gathering wild flowers from the hedges and putting them all round the ribbon of my straw hat.  I can’t pay her the debt of that mark of love the same way, but I feel I should pay it to somebody.  You never told me about your mother.”