The Growing World

The Growing World came into our household in a mysterious fashion. One day, when the eldest born was still a baby, a tall old negress came to the door with a black book under her arm, and urged my mother to buy it. All the knowledge in the world lay between its covers, the negress said, and out of it a child could learn everything he needed to make him wise and famous.

My mother objected to agents, but she could not quite make up her mind to send the old negress away without at least glancing at the book. Perhaps she was attracted by the cover, with its gilt globe flanked by insets of a golden lady in a shepherdess hat, talking to a golden cherub who leaned fondly against her knee. As she looked at the cover, she may have dreamed of sunny afternoons to come, when she too would be feeding just such an eager little mind. At any rate she looked at the book, and finally bought it; and by the time my sister and I began to take an interest in our surroundings, my brother had learned to read and was able to spell out to us this invaluable guide to the universe opening before us.

The Growing World became the inseparable companion and instructor of our childhood. Why we loved it so, I cannot say. We were perfectly normal children. We reveled in Mother Goose and the Jungle Book and Alice in Won-derland, and our Swiss Family Robinson finally fell to pieces from much reading. But when we grew tired of games, and all these favorites palled on us, there was always one sure resort . My brother would bring down the heavy black book, with its crabbed print, and would say, ‘Now, girls, sit quiet while I read.’ And we would sit spellbound by the low west window, while he chanted the marvelous adventures of Herr von Guldenhorn among the African race ‘possessed of but a single pedicle’; or the story of Dahut the beautiful and wicked in the drowned city of Ys; or perhaps a chapter taken at random from a quaint romance that had wandered into the book, recounting the loves of handsome young Captain Devereux and the Lady Constance Delamere.

The style of The Growing World was absolutely unsuited to children. The ponderous Lat inity of the art icles makes me smile now as I read them over. But we were not critical. ‘The Planetary System’ must have been one of our favorite selections, for its pages are thumbed and worn. There was a thrill about that imaginary trip through the stars that our Child’s Astronomy could never give us.

‘ Taking our stand on one of the planets, we wait till evening falls, and look eagerly abroad to mark the altered aspect of the heavens.’

A wonderful beginning that, putting us at once with our heads among the stars. Then what a solemn progress we would make, led by the unknown writer. ‘There surely the old heavens will have passed away from over our heads, the old earth from beneath our feet. But no, as the stars steal out one by one from the darkness, there is the Little Bear with its Pole Star, and the Great Bear with its pointers; there are the bands of Orion and the sweet influences of the Pleiades. Past these we go, and on until the sun itself dwindles down to a star, light fades behind us, and we find ourselves looking into the dark infinitude where God dwells.’

There were other thrillers in the book. My favorite was an article called ‘Life in the Ocean Depths.’ My sister was partial to the story of trufflehunting dogs on the Riviera, and Bordeaux shepherds on their stilts. But we were catholic in our tastes, and there was a miscellany of paragraphs on the making of rubber, the intelligence of toads, the grief of the rhinoceros, German courtships, and London bootblacks, that each in turn satisfied some particular mood.

The poetry we did not like, and we marveled at our aunts, who, when we could persuade them to read The Growing World, invariably chose one of these uninspired rhymes. If they wanted poetry, why could n’t they read us about the forsaken merman, or that wonderful melancholy thing my mot her read, about long dun wolds and Oriana? There was poetry for you; but the jingles in The Growing World were pitifully unworthy so great a book.

Of course, even among ourselves there were sharp differences as to the relative merits of various art icles in the book. My brother had favorites for which we could hold no brief. He liked t he story of the Earl of Rivers, dauntless before the toss of two front teet h in battle; of jolly Corporal Dick, who never said die, and whose bull-dog pluck somehow saved the day at Waterloo. Corporal Dick was my brother’s favorite. His black eyes would burn as he intoned the story, and he seemed to grow taller before us. ‘I’ll be a soldier like that some day,’ he would tell us; and we would hug our dolls closer and gaze at him with fearful admiration.

His taste in humor, too, was a puzzle to us. There was the story of Baron Munchausen’s adventure at the fountain. The Baron, so the story ran, rode into the city gates just as the portcullis was descending. Its sharp iron teeth came down just behind him; but he went on, unaware of anything amiss, until, as his horse was drinking at the fountain, he heard the noise of rushing water behind him, and discovered that he was sitting on only half a horse, the other half having been neatly sliced off by the portcullis. My sister raised a howl every time this ghastly anecdote became the lesson for the day.

’But I don’t want the horse to be hurt that way,’ she would cry.

‘It’s only a joke,’ my brother would say, with a touch of severity.

‘Then why don’t it be funny?’ demanded my sister; and to that, as near as I can remember, my brother never found an answer.

I don’t remember just when we stopped reading The Growing World; but I think it was when my brother went away to school. The book itself disappeared; but its invaluable information st ill followed us wherever we went. The effeminate costumes of the Greek soldiery held no surprises for us, since we had already been introduced to them in The Growing World. We could enjoy our first trap-door spider on terms of lifelong familiarity with his ways, and we could even behold the gigantic alligators of the Florida Everglades without fear, remembering that they were ‘infinitely more ferocious in appearance than in fact, and never aggressively hostile like their treacherous kinsman, the dreaded crocodile of the equatorial regions.’

Through all the years, too, our conduct has been guided by maxims of unimpeachable worth. ‘In this world you are punished for mistakes of the head, in the next, world for mistakes of the heart.’ ‘True bravery is to fear, and yet to stand one’s ground.’ ‘True courtesy saith, “ My pleasure is naught, my neighbor’s pleasure all.” ’

Yes, there was surely magic about the old negress and the big black book she brought under her arm; and we find that we have not yet lost the precious talisman. Not long ago a box of my brother’s books came home from a stormy journey around the Horn; and as he, returned from even stormier times on the Canadian front, opened them up before our eyes, out fell a shabby volume, its gilt globe dimmed, its golden lady lustreless with time. It was The Growing World! And who shall say its usefulness is gone?