Dr. Baāhar, acting in accordance with the suggestion of the Dosch, given a few months previous, had devoted his attention to the cultivation of fruit-bearing plants, shrubs, and trees, but his success from a lack of objective constancy and discriminative judgment, was inclined to be enigmatical in practical results. Instead of studying the practical adaptation of productive vegetation for the requirements of healthful subsistence, he was quite content with transplanting rare growths, obtained from the surrounding country in the latifundium, without anxious regard for the development of fruitful utility, often introducing those that it had required the labor of years to exterminate, when sowed upon the wind from the brink of the precipice by the Indian besiegers. Fortunately his democratic ideas, which reverenced the rights of naturalization in freedom from adaptability, and rapid succession in office, gave his citizen plants but little time to take root, except those of the most worthless description that live upon the blight of the fruitfully good. Yet with all his inadvertencies, accident occasionally favored a useful result, as many of the fugitive growths which had in seed-flight adapted themselves to congenial soil proclaimed their transatlantic origin and capability for life sustaining reproduction with provident forethought in cultivation. His botanical ambition found ample satisfaction in tracing their genealogical relationship without testing their fruitful capacity, except in chimerical 469conjecture, founded upon precedental arguments advanced by the most ancient writers.
Under the affectionate tuition of necessity, Isolita’s instincts had been trained for the consistent conservation and advancement of vitality, and her knowledge, despite the disadvantages of siege, had extended with a wide reach beyond the cinctus walls. With cultivated attainments for the discernment of cause and effect, she had with the dependent emergency of her people upon a continued supply of vegetable products become a practical botanist, capable of tracing at sight the natural life-sustaining affinities of fruits and roots, although ignorant of their technical classification into generas, orders, and species. Visiting the embryotic garden of the doctor, shortly after their espousal, she was surprised to find the only thriving plant the noxious venoseminata, the evil genius of fruitful vegetation, which when once allowed to take root, in new soil, offered hydra resistance to the efforts bestowed for its eradication. With her quick perception she discovered the danger incurred from its heedless cultivation, not only to the plot of her adopted Socius, but to the neighboring plantations, which with full exampled growth would become subject to its contagious encroachments. Quick in preservative action she seized a dibble, and before the technical precedentalist could arrest her practical intention, the malignant parasite was uprooted, and hung dependent from the branch of a tree exposed to the full rays of the sun. Too late for expostulation, the theorist stood aghast at her audacity, but kept silence lest from her skillful use of the dibble she should trace the noxious thrift of the plant to his jesuitical cultivation, despite the warnings of his neighbors. Recovering, when he saw her raise plant after plant, consigning them to the same fate, and in process exposing others to remove from their roots the fatal tentacles, he remonstrated; but she still 470continued her labor, the while congratulating him when she discovered that none of the diffusia had trespassed beyond his limits. At length convinced that no stray fibre remained, she carefully gathered every leaf, branch, and tendril to be united in the fate of the parent stalk. Completing her search for the garroting quirls of the venoseminata, that strangulated above the surface with an effect as deadly as the wide spreading roots beneath the surface, she silently replaced those promising fruition worthy of cultivation, then standing in a smilingly questioning attitude of graceful solicitation, she waited to learn the measure of her Socius’ approval. To which he answered in words, with eyes fitfully glancing askance, half with shame, inwrought with furtive displeasure, “To be sure I understood the nature of the plant, but I wished for the others to grow in company with it, that they might improve upon its evil example, in vindication of our theatrical enactments which portray sensational evil, that they may show the shadow of a surviving moral, for it is the duty of the good to shame the evil; for what says one of your old Roman poets?
“‘In evil company you should ever show,
That purity can protect itself, and ever grow.’”
Isolita. “But did you not see that it was destroying all within its reach?”
Socius. “But as in war, evil eventually exhausts itself; and by furnishing more hardy growths I should have overcome it in time.”
Isolita. “But it would have soon extended itself beyond your limits. Besides, of what avail the cultivation of your ground if your useful plants were condemned to be constantly devoured by this parasite without reaching fruition. In permitting evil to grow and expand under your hand for neighborly infliction, when in the beginning you have the power of suppressing 471it at ease, to perfect extinction, would make you miserably culpable as an abettor.”
Socius. “But your Manatitlan advisers advocate the practical good of their school of hypocrisy, that their scholars may be fore-armed by being forewarned.”
Isolita. “Yes, but the professors are as harmless for evil and injury as those that I have hung in the sun to endure the scorching noon-day heat, with the fruitful soil beyond their reach. Besides the human venoseminatas serve as a warning to their kind, and in their professorial speciality of ingratitude are detained from propagating their deadly example.”
Socius. “But your Manatitlan advisers advocate the practical good that comes from exposing hypocrisy; and their arguments sustained by example, are equivalent to preaching, and our theatrical entertainments founded upon precedental enactments, which appears to be a distinction without a difference in reality.”
Isolita. “As you are aware, the Manatitlan school of hypocrisy was an ulterior resort, forced upon them by the ritualistic duplicity of their Mouthpat neighbors; which, aside from the beneficial result derived from exposing the deceptive incongruities that entailed constantly increasing misery upon the races of mankind, afforded thoughtful stimulus to the graduating novices for suggesting the means of auramental direction, in their aural correspondence with the civilized Giga races.”
Socius. “You are speaking as a Manatitlan, under direction. Is it well for you to submit to the prompting of third parties in your intercourse with me? I have been taught that the marriage alliance should be held sacred as a body corporate united in its parts for communion with self.”
Isolita. “If we consult our mutual advantage, it is not from extending injury but help to others, and 472with the flow of recurrent reciprocation, we in turn are filled to overflowing with grateful emotions of joy. We certainly should not disdain good instruction from any source, which offers experienced advantage for aiding our endeavors in perfecting the attainment of a happy union. As with us of Heraclean lineage, you have acknowledged the near approach of the Manatitlans to happy perfection, and should unite with us in grateful expressions of joy that they are pleased to devote their experience for our advancement in happiness. Their exampled experience in goodly purity, revived in current reciprocation from disembodied affection, affords us a more perfect realization of Creative intention, through the indications of perceptive endowment. If we live dependent upon the vitality of others, without reciprocation, to the exclusion of confidence imparted from the joyous trust of unselfish goodness, we should in fact enact the part of the venoseminata that destroys useful vegetation with the growth of its own grasping evil propensities, which yields to itself a destructive existence in compensation for the injury it inflicts upon the fruitful beneficence of its neighbors.”
Socius. “Your language betrays the Manatitlan philosopher, rather than the wife; who according to our creed should obey her husband in all things. We have a proverb in Germany, that says ‘Two literary philosophers can never agree in a common household;’ and another that reads, ‘It is better to have a wife submissively weak in intellect, than strong in mind.’ So you will perceive that in sequence it logically follows that children born from united strength will become heterodox to ancestral faith, unless left early to the example and correction of a surviving parent.”
Isolita. “With the indwelling sanction of purity and goodness, we accord to the Manatitlans a better interpretation of Creative indications from practical 473knowledge, and are grateful for their aid prompted by well tested experience devoted to an enduring perception of our immortal privilege of living in life away from the gross control of instinctive desires, which in confluence with united parental example lives ever with us proof to bereavement.”
Socius. “I certainly wish to understand you, and better still, I would have you comprehend me without other aid than I am able to impart. For as I have been taught, it is esteemed absolutely necessary for a wife to reverence her h............