So Jonah was exceeding glad of the Gourd. I can understand his feelings perfectly. Does it not happen to most of us, at least once in a lifetime, thus to be “exceeding glad of the Gourd,” and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred with the same result? “_Nil violentum est perpetuum._” So surely as it comes up in a night, so surely must it wither in a day. You have been in a hot climate? I don’t intend any disagreeable allusion, I mean the tropics, I give you my honour! Do you not remember the delight of getting out of your tent, or “booth” as we still call them at our village merry-makings, to sit under anything like a tree or shrub, where, shaded from the sun, you could catch the welcome breath of every breeze that blew? The French officers in the Crimea used to build for themselves trellised out-houses of branches interlaced, swearing volubly the while, and appearing to derive from these bowers no small comfort and refreshment. I can imagine the astonishment of “_mon lieutenant_” when, on waking in his tent, he should have discovered, like “Jack and the Beanstalk,” that one of these had sprung up for him, unsolicited, in a night. How he would have stared, and shrugged, and gesticulated, and cursed his star with less asperity, and been “exceeding glad of the Gourd!” They are of many kinds, these excrescences that grow up with such marvellous celerity to afford us an intense and illusive delight; but they all resemble their prototype at Nineveh, in so far that, ere the seed has yet germinated, the worm is already prepared which shall smite the gourd, and cause it to wither away. There were hundreds of them shot to gigantic dimensions and exploded with the South Sea bubble of the last century. Thousands owed their birth and disappearance to the railway fever of five-and-twenty years ago. Not a few were called into existence by a blockade of the Southern ports, during the late war of opinion in the United States, and destroyed by its suspension at the peace. It seems to be a law in the moral as in the physical world that the endurance of things must be in proportion to the length of time required to bring them to maturity. The oak is said to be three hundred years in arriving at its prime, and that its vigour is still unimpaired after a thousand changes of foliage we have ocular demonstration in many parts of England; while the mustard-and-cress, which can be raised in twenty minutes on a square of flannel dipped in hot water, wastes and withers away in an hour.