ey do. Remember
they are mines--not gold mines, but something richer still--food mines,
which Madam How thrust into the inside of the earth, ages and ages since,
as molten lava rock, and then cooled them and lifted them up, and pared
them away with her ice-plough and her rain-spade, and spread the stuff of
them over the wide carses round, to make in that bleak northern climate,
which once carried nothing but fir-trees and heather, a soil fit to feed
a great people; to cultivate in them industry, and science, and valiant
self-dependence and self-help; and to gather round the Heart of
Midlothian and the Castle Rock of Edinburgh the stoutest and the ablest
little nation which Lady Why has made since she made the Greeks who
fought at Salamis.

Of those Greeks you have read, or ought to read, in Mr. Cox's _Tales of
the Persian War_. Some day you will read of them in their own books,
written in their grand old tongue. Remember that Lady Why made them, as
she has made the Scotch, by first preparing a country for them, which
would call out all their courage and their skill; and then by giving them
the courage and the skill to make use of the land where she had put them.

And now think what a wonderful fairy tale you might write for
yourself--and every word of it true--of the adventures of one atom of
Potash or some other Salt, no bigger than a needle's point, in such a
lava stream as I have been telling of. How it has run round and round,
and will run round age after age, in an endless chain of change. How it
began by being molten fire underground, how then it became part of a hard
cold rock, lifted up into a cliff, beaten upon by rain and storm, and
washed down into the soil of the plain, till, perhaps, the little atom of
mineral met with the rootlet of some great tree, and was taken up into
its sap in spring, through tiny veins, and hardened the next year into a
piece of solid wood. And then how that tree was cut down, and its logs,
it may be, burnt upon the hearth, till the little atom of mineral lay
among the wood-ashes, and was shovelled out and thrown upon the field and
washed into the soil again, and taken up by the roots of a clover plant,
and became an atom of vegetable matter once more. And then how, perhaps,
a rabbit came by, and ate the clover, and the grain of mineral became
part of the rabbit; and then how a hawk killed that rabbit, and ate it,
and so the grain became part of the hawk; and how the farmer sh