"'It is not because there is not enough: it is because your people are so short-sighted, so jealous and selfish, and so curiously infatuated with things that are not so good as your old toys which you have flung away and forgotten. And you teach the children hum, hum, all day to care about such silly things, and to work for them, and to look to them as the object of their lives. It is because you do not share us among you without price or difference; because you do not share the great earth among you fairly, without spite and jealousy and avarice; because you will not agree; you silly, foolish people to let all the flowers wither for a thousand years while you keep each other at a distance, instead of agreeing and sharing them! Is there something in you--as there is poison in the nightshade, you know it, dear, your papa told you not to touch it--is there a sort of poison in your people that works them up into a hatred of one another? Why, then, do you not agree and have all things, all the great earth can give you, just as we have the sunshine and the rain? How happy your people could be if they would only agree! But you go on teaching even the little children to follow the same silly objects, hum, hum, hum, all the day, and they will grow up to hate each other, and to try which can get the most round things--you have one in your pocket.' "'Sixpence,' said Guido. 'It's quite a new one.' "'And other things quite as silly,' the Wheat continued. 'All the time the flowers are flowering, but they will go, even the oaks will go. We think the reason you do not all have plenty, and why you do not do only just a little work, and why you die of hunger if you leave off, and why so many of you are unhappy in body and mind, and all the misery is because you have not got a spirit like the wheat, like us; you will not agree, and you will not share, and you will hate each other, and you will be so avaricious, and you will _not_ touch the flowers, or go into the sunshine (you would rather half of you died among the hard stones first), and you will teach your children hum, hum, to follow in some foolish course that has caused you all this unhappiness a thousand years, and you will _not_ have a spirit like us, and feel like us. Till you have a spirit like us, and feel like us, you will never, never be happy.'" Was not that a fine talk for the child to have with the wheat-ear? And there is more of it, a great deal more in this story without an end which you will find in the book called "The Open Air." Again, another boy--not Guido by any means, nor in the least like Guido--had been sent to gather acorns. He gathered a few, dropped them into his bag, and lay down in the warm corner by the root of the tree to sleep. There his grandmother found him, and there she beat him.