We don't know each other's secrets quite so
well as we flatter ourselves we do. We don't always know our own secrets
as well as we might. You have seen a tree with different grafts upon it,
an apple or a pear tree we will say. In the late summer months the fruit
on one bough will ripen; I remember just such a tree, and the early
ripening fruit was the Jargonelle. By and by the fruit of another bough
will begin to come into condition; the lovely Saint Michael, as I
remember, grew on the same stock as the Jargonelle in the tree I am
thinking of; and then, when these have all fallen or been gathered,
another, we will say the Winter Nelis, has its turn, and so out of the
same juices have come in succession fruits of the most varied aspects and
flavors. It is the same thing with ourselves, but it takes us a long
while to find it out. The various inherited instincts ripen in
succession. You may be nine tenths paternal at one period of your life,
and nine tenths maternal at another. All at once the traits of some
immediate ancestor may come to maturity unexpectedly on one of the
branches of your character, just as your features at different periods of
your life betray different resemblances to your nearer or more remote
relatives.
But I want you to let me go back to the Bunker Hill Monument and the
dynasty of twenty or thirty centuries whose successive representatives
are to sit in the gate, like the Jewish monarchs, while the people shall
come by hundreds and by thousands to visit the memorial shaft until the
story of Bunker's Hill is as old as that of Marathon.
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