summer sunset and wrapped them around the radish's root down there in
the darkness in the ground? I cannot understand a radish; can you? If
one refused to eat anything until he could understand the mystery of its
growth, he would die of starvation; but mystery does not bother us in
the dining-room,--it is only in the church that mystery seems to give us
trouble.

In travelling around the world I found that the egg is a universal form
of food. When we reached Asia the cooking was so different from ours
that the boiled egg was sometimes the only home-like thing we could find
on the table. I became so attached to the egg, that, when I returned to
the United States, for weeks I felt like taking my hat off to every hen
I met. What is more mysterious than an egg? Take a fresh egg; it is not
only good food, but an important article of merchandise. But loan a
fresh egg to a hen, after the hen has developed a well-settled tendency
to sit, and let her keep the egg under her for a week, and, as any
housewife will tell you, it loses a large part of its market value. But
be patient with the hen; let her have it for two weeks more and she will
give you back a chicken that you could not find in the egg. No one can
understand the egg, but we all like eggs.

Water is essential to human life, and has been from the beginning, but
it is only a short time ago, relatively speaking, that we learned that
water is composed of gas. Two gases got mixed together and could not get
apart and we call the mixture water, but it was much more important that
man should have had water to drink all these years than it was to find
out that water is composed of gas. And there is one thing about water
that we do not yet understand, viz., why it differs from other things
in this, that other things continue to contract indefinitely under the
influence of cold, while water contracts until it reaches a certain
temperature and then, the rule being reversed, expands under the
influence of more intense cold? It does not make much difference whether
we ever learn _why_ this is true, but it is important to the world to
know that it is so.

Sometimes I go into a community and find a young man who has come in
from the country and obtained a smattering of knowledge; then his head
swells and he begins to swagger around and say that an intelligent man
like himself cannot afford to have anything to do with anything that he
cannot understand. Poor boy, he will be surprise