Norwich bulletin., 1920-08-27
The Lesson of the Importance of Little Things.

I to her, "send for me, and I'll carry it home with me and turn it loose in my gardens" Why" she calculated, what
 do you possibly mean?" Whereupon l explained to her that snakes and toads and a few such unpleasant looking crea- lures were really the best friends the
 gardener has, eating more bugs and
 slugs and grubs in 2 day than he could kill in a week.
 don't like snakes, OF tsads, or angle worms not as pets and companions, anyway. I don't want to handle them,
 nor carry them around in my. pockets as have known small boys to do-and oc- casional adults, also But 1t has long
 been an unwritten law in my gardens that they are never to be killed, Snakes
 and toads are working for me morning. noon, and night, eating off the pests which, unlike them, seek to destroy my plants. They do not look handsome, but they do a mighty handsome stroke of
 them, not for their appearance but for their service.
 Aneleworms are less in evidence. They burrow beneath the surface and I've heard of farmers who sagely opined that they weakened the soir' by withdraw ing plant food from it. When the sim pie fact is that they stir it, aerate it, loosen it, subsoil it all their lives, and enrich 1t with their decaying links when
 dead. Which compound service they perform unheard, mostly unseen and usually quite unFegarded. It is probably
 true in a literal and exact sense that
 they stir more soil in year than all the blows and tractors in the world. Fur thermore, they do much of their stirring and loosening and aerating and enrich ing under growing grains and grasses, where clumsy man-made tools can't work without destroying more crops than they help.
 Second lesson: That a good many
 small and insignificant and supposedly l contemptible things are, really, more important than bigger and showier con traptions. The elephant is several sizes bigger than the angleworm. but he isn't worth as much, individuality nor ton for ton as the angleworm hories The big | beast makes finer show in the circus parade, and piles up tinbers that would crush a million angleworms into slimy pulp, but all the work of all the elephants in Asia and Africa, combined, isn't equal in volume or value to that done regularly by the nasty little worms
 in the soil
 And third great moral lesson is that the anCleworm does it all without
 
 ask for help or care or applause. All he wants is to be let alone ana allowed to work for us, without being dug up too numerously to serve as trout-bait All his millions, working at once, don't make as much noise as single snorttng, back-fring coughing, clanking, creaking
 tractor. But he gets there, just the
 same
 We've most of us known men of that sort; men who made very little noise about their work and yet accomplished a tremendous lot by everlastingly keep ing at it in quiet but efficient way. Down in the bottom of our hearts, we've always admired them more than the slan-bang kind who can't stoop to pick up pin without first taking off their coats and rolling up their sleeves and splitting on their hands and sending for
 reporter to write up the performance. Why shouldn't We also pay the tribute of our admiration to the lowly angle