[In reciting this sweetly beautiful little poem its noble truths should be uttered with emphatic, but not noisy elocution. There is sufficient variety in the different stanzas for the speaker to display much taste and feeling.]
God might have bade the earth bring forth Enough for great and small, The oak-tree and the cedar-tree, Without a flower at all.
We might have had enough, enough For every want of ours, For luxury, medicine and toil, And yet have had no flowers.
The one within the mountain mine Requireth none to grow; Nor does it need the lotus-flower To make the river flow.
The clouds might give abundant rain; The nightly dews might fall, And the herb that keepeth life in man Might yet have drunk them all.
Then wherefore, wherefore were they made, All dyed with rainbow-light, All fashioned with supremest grace Upspringing day and night:--
Springing in valleys green and low, And on the mountains high, And in the silent wilderness Where no man passes by?
Our outward life requires them not-- Then wherefore had they birth?-- To minister delight to man, To beautify the earth;
To comfort man--to whisper hope, Whene'er his faith is dim, For who so careth for the flowers Will much more care for him!
Good morning, Doctor; how do you do? I haint quite so well as I have been; but I think I'm some better than I was. I don't think that last medicine you gin me did me much good. I had a terrible time with the ear-ache last night; my wife got up and drapt a few draps of Walnut sap into it, and that relieved it some; but I didn't get a wink of sleep till nearly daylight. For nearly a week, Doctor, I've had the worst kind of a narvous head-ache; it has been so bad sometimes that I thought my head would bust open. Oh, dear! I sometimes think that I'm the most afflictedest human that ever lived.
Since this cold weather sot in, that troublesome cough, that I have had every winter for the last fifteen year, has began to pester me agin.
(_Coughs._) Doctor, do you think you can give me anything that will relieve this desprit pain I have in my side?
Then I have a crick, at times, in the back of my neck so that I can't turn my head without turning the hull of my body. (_Coughs._)
Oh, dear! What shall I do! I have consulted almost every doctor in the country, but they don't any of them seem to understand my case. I have tried everything that I could think of; but I can't find anything that does me the leastest good. (_Coughs._)
