Madam How and Lady Why | Page 7

eggs. She will spend thousands of years in building up a mountain, and thousands of years in grinding it down again; and then carefully polish every grain of sand which falls from that mountain, and put it in its right place, where it will be wanted thousands of years hence; and she will take just as much trouble about that one grain of sand as she did about the whole mountain. She will settle the exact place where Mrs. Daddy- long-legs shall lay her eggs, at the very same time that she is settling what shall happen hundreds of years hence in a stair millions of miles away. And I really believe that Madam How knows her work so thoroughly, that the grain of sand which sticks now to your shoe, and the weight of Mrs. Daddy-long-legs' eggs at the bottom of her hole, will have an effect upon suns and stars ages after you and I are dead and gone. Most patient indeed is Madam How. She does not mind the least seeing her own work destroyed; she knows that it must be destroyed. There is a spell upon her, and a fate, that everything she makes she must unmake again: and yet, good and wise woman as she is, she never frets, nor tires, nor fudges her work, as we say at school. She takes just as much pains to make an acorn as to make a peach. She takes just as much pains about the acorn which the pig eats, as about the acorn which will grow into a tall oak, and help to build a great ship. She took just as much pains, again, about the acorn which you crushed under your foot just now, and which you fancy will never come to anything. Madam How is wiser than that. She knows that it will come to something. She will find some use for it, as she finds a use for everything. That acorn which you crushed will turn into mould, and that mould will go to feed the roots of some plant, perhaps next year, if it lies where it is; or perhaps it will be washed into the brook, and then into the river, and go down to the sea, and will feed the roots of some plant in some new continent ages and ages hence: and so Madam How will have her own again. You dropped your stick into the river yesterday, and it floated away. You were sorry, because it had cost you a great deal of trouble to cut it, and peel it, and carve a head and your name on it. Madam How was not sorry, though she had taken a great deal more trouble with that stick than ever you had taken. She had been three years making that stick, out of many things, sunbeams among the rest. But when it fell into the river, Madam How knew that she should not lose her sunbeams nor anything else: the stick would float down the river, and on into the sea; and there, when it got heavy with the salt water, it would sink, and lodge, and be buried, and perhaps ages hence turn into coal; and ages after that some one would dig it up and burn it, and then out would come, as bright warm flame, all the sunbeams that were stored away in that stick: and so Madam How would have her own again. And if that should not be the fate of your stick, still something else will happen to it just as useful in the long run; for Madam How never loses anything, but uses up all her scraps and odds and ends somehow, somewhere, somewhen, as is fit and proper for the Housekeeper of the whole Universe. Indeed, Madam How is so patient that some people fancy her stupid, and think that, because she does not fall into a passion every time you steal her sweets, or break her crockery, or disarrange her furniture, therefore she does not care. But I advise you as a little boy, and still more when you grow up to be a man, not to get that fancy into your head; for you will find that, however good-natured and patient Madam How is in most matters, her keeping silence and not seeming to see you is no sign that she has forgotten. On the contrary, she bears a grudge (if one may so say, with all respect to her) longer than any one else does; because she will always have her own again. Indeed, I sometimes think that if it were not for Lady Why, her mistress, she might bear some of her grudges for ever and ever. I have seen men ere now damage some of Madam How's