"What is the matter, do you ask?" groaned the Oak more heavily than ever--"you who can change your position and act independently when you wish; you who are _not_ left a useless log as I am, the scorn and sport of my own kith and kin? Yes, the very planks who balance themselves on my body, and mock me by their activity, have probably come from my own side, and once hung on me as branches, drinking in life from the life I gave. Oh miserable me! miserable, despised, useless!" Now there may be plenty of animals to be found with more brilliant abilities and livelier imagination than the Snail, but for gravity of demeanour and calmness of nerve who is his equal? And if a sound judgment be not behind such outward signs, there is no faith to be put in faces! Accordingly, Sir Helix Hortensis--so let us call him, for that is his scientific name--made no answer at first to the wailings of the Oak. Three times he crawled round it, leaving three fresh traces of his transit, before he spoke, his horns turning hither and thither as those wonderful eyes at the end strove to take in the full state of the case. And his are not the eyes, you know, which waste their energies in scatter-brained staring. He keeps them cool in their cases till there is something to be looked at, and then turns them inside out to do their work. And thus he looked, and he looked, and he looked, while the children went on shouting, and the plank went on see-sawing, and the Tree went on groaning; and as he looked, he considered. "Have you anything to say?" at last inquired the Oak, who had had long experience of Sir Helix's wisdom. "I have," answered the Snail. "You don't know your own value, that's all." "Ask the see-sawers my value!" exclaimed the prostrate Tree, bitterly. "One up at the stars, another beyond the world! What am _I_ doing meanwhile?" "Holding them both up, which is more than they can do for themselves," muttered the Snail, turning round to go back to the grass. "But--but--stop a moment, dear Sir Helix; the see-sawers don't think that," argued the Tree. "They're all light-minded together, and don't think," sneered the Snail. "Up in the sky one minute, down in the dust the next. Never you mind that. Everybody can't play at high jinks with comfort, luckily for the rest of the world. Sit fast, do your duty, and have faith. While they are going flightily up and down, your steady balance is the saving of both." THE STORY OF A STONE By David Starr Jordan