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If I had not already been travelling for a fortnight, or if Heaven had endowed me with fewer inches so that my clothing were not so exclusively my own, the problem of the interim till the next boat would be simpler. I have had my first, and I may add my last, experience of "brewis," an indeterminate concoction much in favour as an article of diet on this coast.

Temperate South America is as fertile and healthy for the white man as temperate North America, and is so much less in extent as to offer a far simpler problem of conquest and settlement; yet the Spaniard, who came to the Plata two centuries before the American backwoodsman reached the Mississippi, scarcely made as much progress in a decade as his northern rival did in a year.

Of course these carpenters lived quite separate from the inhabitants of the island, and as long as they did not touch the lepers, or anything used by them, were in no danger of catching the disease; while in order to hasten matters the Father turned his own carpentering talents to advantage, and with the help of some of the leper boys built a good many of the simpler houses, in which the poorer people were to live.

Heavy responsibilities are lightly assumed nowadays, because the temptations of power and publicity are very strong, and because too high a value is set upon worldly success. It is a plainer and simpler duty for those who wish to act rightly, and who have formed a deliberate idea of own limitations, to refuse great positions humbly and seriously, if they know that they will be unequal to them.

Even if the poor had been actually no poorer in these flush days than they had been when manners were simpler, the glaring contrasts would have been maddening.

While learning how to handle gases led to the discovery of oxygen, and to modern chemistry, and to the notion of the indestructibility of matter. Again, what simpler, or more absolutely practical, than the attempt to keep the axle of a wheel from heating when the wheel turns round very fast?

The popular traditions of the simpler peoples recognize a certain community of nature between man, brute animals, and even plants; and this serves to explain why the apologue or fable, which ascribes the power of speech and the faculty of reason to birds, quadrupeds, insects, flowers, and trees, is one of the earliest forms of literary composition.

A simpler term, however, quite as distinctive, and more descriptive of their structure, is that of the stratified and massive or unstratified rocks.

Whoever has visited such sites will understand the impression they conveyed to men of simpler ages.

As here they chatted and plotted, there entered the church three young men; and what simpler than to engage them as companions in their retreat, especially as all three, like all seven of the young women, were accomplished tellers of stories with no fear whatever of Mrs. Grundy? And thus the "Decameron" of Giovanni Boccaccio came about.