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.