"When
you add _a long time to build_, I am also puzzled to understand
you. For are not all houses, like the forest of trees, the human race,
the world we live in, eternal?"
"If they stand forever they are so in one sense, I suppose," I answered,
beginning to fear that I had already unfortunately broken the rule I had
so recently laid down for my own guidance. "But the trees of the forest,
to which you compare a house, spring from seed, do they not? and so have
a beginning. Their end also, like the end of man, is to die and return
to the dust."
"That is true," he returned; "it is, moreover, a truth which I do not
now hear for the first time; but it has no connection with the subject
we are discussing. Men pass away, and others take their places. Trees
also decay, but the forest does not die, or suffer for the loss of
individual trees; is it not the same with the house and the family
inhabiting it, which is one with the house, and endures forever, albeit
the members composing it must all in time return to the dust?"
"Is there no decay, then, of the materials composing a house?"
"Assuredly there is! Even the hardest stone is worn in time by the
elements, or by the footsteps of many generations of men; but the stone
that decays is removed, and the house does not suffer.
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