“It sometimes comes to me like this, my lady, when I am amongst my flowers and plants and seeds, and folks come to me and say, ‘Abner, why do you do this?’ and ‘Abner, why do you do that?’ Look at the little seeds as they lie on your hand--seeming so like to one another that even the best of us would be puzzled to know some kinds apart; but when they grow up, how different they appear, and how different they have to be treated! Some are hardy things, and are put out to face the biting winds and cruel snows of winter, and nothing given them for protection, whilst others are tenderly protected from the least hardship, and grow up in the soft warm air of the hot-house, watered and tended and watched over like petted children. Is it because the gardener loves one sort of seed more than another that he treats them so differently? What sort of a garden would he have when the summer came had he put the tender hot-house seeds out in the cold ground, and tried to grow the hardy seedlings in a hot-house? And then again, see how the different plants are treated as they grow up under the same gardener’s eye. Look at these great specimen heliotropes and fuchsias and petunias. How were they treated when they were young?--pinched in, trained, clipped, kept back, as it seemed, in every possible way, everything against them, everything, as one would say, taken from them, till the right stature and height and growth had been attained, and then encouraged to bud and break where it had been decided they should; and now see the beautiful graceful trees--a joy to the eye and to the heart--covered with blossom, rejoicing as it seems in their beauty, the pride of the gardener who seemed at first so cruel to them, so resolved to keep them barren and unlovely.” Bride drew a long breath and clasped her hands together. She had asked sometimes deep down in her heart why her own life had been left so desolate by the death of her mother. Was she in some sort finding an answer now? Was it perhaps for her ultimate good and for the glory of God that she was thus heavily chastened in her youth? Abner had made a slight pause, but now he continued, speaking in the same slow way, with the same rather remarkable choice of words for a man of his class.