It must be sown fresh every year in ground which has been made ready
for it. Did you ever pluck one of the golden ears from a field of corn, and
sit down and count how many grains there were upon one slender stalk? And
then did you think that every little grain in that ear was itself a seed
which, just as the egg contains the bird that is one day to fly and sing,
wraps up within itself a young wheat-stalk with all the golden ears which
may wave and rustle when next year's harvest time has come? No longer then
the one lonely seed dropped by the hand of the sower into the good soil
prepared for it, but many, many grains instead. So true is it that
"A grain of corn an infant's hand
May plant upon an inch of land,
Whence twenty stalks may spring and yield,
Enough to stock a little field.
"The harvest of that field may then
Be multiplied to ten times ten,
Which, sown thrice more, would furnish bread
Wherewith an army might be fed."
And such life is there in seed, that even grains of corn which had been
hidden away for thousands of years--wrapped up in an Egyptian tomb within
a mummy like those you saw at the Museum the other day--when sown still
brought forth fruit; not in Egypt where they first grew, but in England.
But those grains which had slept the sleep of ages would never have thus
wakened into life and fruitfulness unless they had been sown in the earth;
for before we can see the "full corn in the ear," the one grain from which
so many were to come, must "fall into the ground and die": in darkness and
silence and death the plant is born, and begins to show signs of life.
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