The arbor
The arbor
Hereare two girls and a boy in the arbor; one of the girls is reading, and the others are listening. It is a pleasant thing to be beneath a roof of green leaves, and to be surrounded by sweet-scented flowers. It is a very pleasant thing to sit down in such a place with an agreeable book. Do you not envy the children in the picture?
And what book do you imagine they are reading? Perhaps it is one of the numbers of Parley’s Cabinet Library, which Messrs. Bradbury & Soden have just published. No doubt you have read them; but I will tell you about one of the volumes that is to be published in a few days.
It is entitled Curiosities of Human Nature, and it gives an account of a great many wonderful people. It tells about Zerah Colburn, who was a natural arithmetician. One day, his father heard him, while he was a little child playing among the chips, saying the multiplication table to himself. His father then began to examine him, and he found that he could answer almost any question in arithmetic, although he was only six years old, and could not read, and had never been taught anything.
His father took Zerah to Boston and New York, and other places, and the child astonished everybody, by his wonderful answers to arithmetical questions. He could tell how many minutes there were in two thousand years; how many steps, three feet long, it would take to go round the earth; he could find the square root and the cube root of any number. His performances were indeed amazing.
Mr. Colburn, finally, set off with his son for England; here the child wasvisited by thousands of people. They then went to France, and he excited such an interest there, that Bonaparte had him put into one of the colleges of Paris.
I cannot tell you the whole story of Zerah, but you will find it, and many other curious and wonderful lives, in the number of Parley’s Cabinet Library of which I speak. You will find the story of a miser, who shut himself in a vault with his money, and where, though surrounded with silver and gold, he perished miserably for the want of bread and water. You will find the story of the great Sir Isaac Newton, who, when a child, made a little mill, and put a kitten in it, whom he called the miller; you will find the story of Elijah Thayer, who went, a few months since, to see Victoria, queen of England, and tell her that she would very soon be obliged to wash her own dishes.
Among other things in Parley’s book, you will find the story of a very wonderful man named Joseph Clark. This person could twist his face about so that his most intimate friends would not know him. He could also distort his body in the most strange manner. Here is a picture of him.
Joseph Clark
Clark was a pleasant, funny fellow, and he often amused himself and others with his queer tricks. One day he went to a tailor to have a coat made. When the tailor measured him he had a huge hump on his right shoulder. When he went to try on the coat, the hump was on the left shoulder. The tailor was greatly astonished—begged pardon for his blunder, and straightway undertook to alter the coat. When Clark went again to try it on, behold the villanous hump was in the middle of his back!