gestures. Have you not often seen how they bend to and fro, and nod and move all their green leaves, when there is the gentlest breeze? To them this is as intelligible as words are to us.”
“Does the Professor understand their gestures, then?” said little Ida.
“To be sure he does. One morning he came into the garden and remarked that a great stinging-nettle was conversing on very intimate terms with a pretty young carnation. ‘You are so beautiful,’ said the nettle to the carnation, and I love you so devotedly!’ But the Professor would not suffer any thing of the sort, and tapped the nettle on his leaves—for those are its fingers; but they stung him so that from that day forward he has never ventured to meddle with a stinging-nettle again.”
“Ha! ha! ha! that was good fun indeed,” laughed little Ida.
“What’s the meaning of this,” said the Professor of Mathematics, who had just come to pay a visit, “to tell the child such nonsense!” He could not bear the young
