Dr. Baahar, acting in accordance with the suggestion of the Dosch, given a few months previous, had devoted his attention to the cultivation of fruit-bearing plants, shrubs, and trees, but his success from a lack of objective constancy and discriminative judgment, was inclined to be enigmatical in practical results. Instead of studying the practical adaptation of productive vegetation for the requirements of healthful subsistence, he was quite content with transplanting rare growths, obtained from the surrounding country in the latifundium, without anxious regard for the development of fruitful utility, often introducing those that it had required the labor of years to exterminate, when sowed upon the wind from the brink of the precipice by the Indian besiegers. Fortunately his democratic ideas, which reverenced the rights of naturalization in freedom from adaptability, and rapid succession in office, gave his citizen plants but little time to take root, except those of the most worthless description that live upon the blight of the fruitfully good. Yet with all his inadvertencies, accident occasionally favored a useful result, as many of the fugitive growths which had in seed-flight adapted themselves to congenial soil proclaimed their transatlantic origin and capability for life sustaining reproduction with provident forethought in cultivation. His botanical ambition found ample satisfaction in tracing their genealogical relationship without testing their fruitful capacity, except in chimerical conjecture, founded upon precedental arguments advanced by the most ancient writers.

Under the affectionate tuition of necessity, Isolita’s instincts had been trained for the consistent conservation and advancement of vitality, and her knowledge, despite the disadvantages of siege, had extended with a wide reach beyond the cinctus walls. With cultivated attainments for the discernment of cause and effect, she had with the dependent emergency of her people upon a continued supply of vegetable products become a practical botanist, capable of tracing at sight the natural life-sustaining affinities of fruits and roots, although ignorant of their technical classification into generas, orders, and species. Visiting the embryotic garden of the doctor, shortly after their espousal, she was surprised to find the only thriving plant the noxious venoseminata, the evil genius of fruitful vegetation, which when once allowed to take root, in new soil, offered hydra resistance to the efforts bestowed for its eradication. With her quick perception she discovered the danger incurred from its heedless cultivation, not only to the plot of her adopted Socius, but to the neighboring plantations, which with full exampled growth would become subject to its contagious encroachments. Quick in preservative action she seized a dibble, and before the technical precedentalist could arrest her practical intention, the malignant parasite was uprooted, and hung dependent from the branch of a tree exposed to the full rays of the sun. Too late for expostulation, the theorist stood aghast at her audacity, but kept silence lest from her skillful use of the dibble she should trace the noxious thrift of the plant to his jesuitical cultivation, despite the warnings of his neighbors. Recovering, when he saw her raise plant after plant, consigning them to the same fate, and in process exposing others to remove from their roots the fatal tentacles, he remonstrated; but she still continued her labor, the while congratulating him when she discovered that none of the diffusia had trespassed beyond his limits. At length convinced that no stray fibre remained, she carefully gathered every leaf, branch, and tendril to be united in the fate of the parent stalk. Completing her search for the garroting quirls of the venoseminata, that strangulated above the surface with an effect as deadly as the wide spreading roots beneath the surface, she silently replaced those promising fruition worthy of cultivation, then standing in a smilingly questioning attitude of graceful solicitation, she waited to learn the measure of her Socius’ approval. To which he answered in words, with eyes fitfully glancing askance, half with shame, inwrought with furtive displeasure, “To be sure I understood the nature of the plant, but I wished for the others to grow in company with it, that they might improve upon its evil example, in vindication of our theatrical enactments which portray sensational evil, that they may show the shadow of a surviving moral, for it is the duty of the good to shame the evil; for what says one of your old Roman poets?

Isolita. “But did you not see that it was destroying all within its reach?”

Socius. “But as in war, evil eventually exhausts itself; and by furnishing more hardy growths I should have overcome it in time.”

Isolita. “But it would have soon extended itself beyond your limits. Besides, of what avail the cultivation of your ground if your useful plants were condemned to be constantly devoured by this parasite without reaching fruition. In permitting evil to grow and expand under your hand for neighborly infliction, when in the beginning you have the power of suppressing it at ease, to perfect extinction, would make you miserably culpable as an abettor.”

Socius. “But your Manatitlan advisers advocate the practical good of their school of hypocrisy, that their scholars may be fore-armed by being forewarned.”

Isolita. “Yes, but the professors are as harmless for evil and injury as those that I have hung in the sun to endure the scorching noon-day heat, with the fruitful soil beyond their reach. Besides the human venoseminatas serve as a warning to their kind, and in their professorial speciality of ingratitude are detained from propagating their deadly example.”

Socius. “But your Manatitlan advisers advocate the practical good that comes from exposing hypocrisy; and their arguments sustained by example, are equivalent to preaching, and our theatrical entertainments founded upon precedental enactments, which appears to be a distinction without a difference in reality.”

Isolita. “As you are aware, the Manatitlan school of hypocrisy was an ulterior resort, forced upon them by the ritualistic duplicity of their Mouthpat neighbors; which, aside from the beneficial result derived from exposing the deceptive incongruities that entailed constantly increasing misery upon the races of mankind, afforded thoughtful stimulus to the graduating novices for suggesting the means of auramental direction, in their aural correspondence with the civilized Giga races.”

Socius. “You are speaking as a Manatitlan, under direction. Is it well for you to submit to the prompting of third parties in your intercourse with me? I have been taught that the marriage alliance should be held sacred as a body corporate united in its parts for communion with self.”

Isolita. “If we consult our mutual advantage, it is not from extending injury but help to others, and with the flow of recurrent reciprocation, we in turn are filled to overflowing with grateful emotions of joy. We certainly should not disdain good instruction from any source, which offers experienced advantage for aiding our endeavors in perfecting the attainment of a happy union. As with us of Heraclean lineage, you have acknowledged the near approach of the Manatitlans to happy perfection, and should unite with us in grateful expressions of joy that they are pleased to devote their experience for our advancement in happiness. Their exampled experience in goodly purity, revived in current reciprocation from disembodied affection, affords us a more perfect realization of Creative intention, through the indications of perceptive endowment. If we live dependent upon the vitality of others, without reciprocation, to the exclusion of confidence imparted from the joyous trust of unselfish goodness, we should in fact enact the part of the venoseminata that destroys useful vegetation with the growth of its own grasping evil propensities, which yields to itself a destructive existence in compensation for the injury it inflicts upon the fruitful beneficence of its neighbors.”

Socius. “Your language betrays the Manatitlan philosopher, rather than the wife; who according to our creed should obey her husband in all things. We have a proverb in Germany, that says ‘Two literary philosophers can never agree in a common household;’ and another that reads, ‘It is better to have a wife submissively weak in intellect, than strong in mind.’ So you will perceive that in sequence it logically follows that children born from united strength will become heterodox to ancestral faith, unless left early to the example and correction of a surviving parent.”

Isolita. “With the indwelling sanction of purity and goodness, we accord to the Manatitlans a better interpretation of Creative indications from practical knowledge, and are grateful for their aid prompted by well tested experience devoted to an enduring perception of our immortal privilege of living in life away from the gross control of instinctive desires, which in confluence with united parental example lives ever with us proof to bereavement.”

Socius. “I certainly wish to understand you, and better still, I would have you comprehend me without other aid than I am able to impart. For as I have been taught, it is esteemed absolutely necessary for a wife to reverence her husband as a director from acknowledged superiority, with a submissive affection contentfully obedient in affording a guarantee for the peaceful assurance of the household. Law and order, under the ruling control of the husband, are as essential for the preservation of domestic discipline as public.”

Isolita (smiling sadly). “Can union abide with the superiority of one part above another, that with assumption dictates subserviency in the place of equality? To love, with us, is to be loved; and, as you have experienced, we have no jarring discords from selfish indulgence, for in recognition of the unprivileged specialities of brute instinct, in contradistinction we are enabled to consult the body’s requirements for healthy support, in appropriate degree for the healthy manifestation of affectionate equality, in check of the cravings for excessive gratification that with material clog is the pampering source of all the woes of the Giga race.”

Socius. “So, so, I see that a Heraclean wife includes the dictation of a Manatitlan bride.”

Isolita. “It is not our wish to ‘dictate or argue,’ for we have been well informed of the dissentious meaning of the words in exampled use with the Gigas. But you must be well aware, that unless confidingly united in sympathy our union is void, and our example would impart evil rather than good. It is from the consciousness of grateful appreciation derived from imparted affection that we obtain our impressions of happiness, and in extension of immortality.”

Socius (abashed). “You make me feel from your affectionate solicitation, in self-reproof, for my repellance, like a father who has dictated to his children, by recommendation and example, politic hypocrisy, sword exercise, and dancing, as passports for the enjoyment of life, with the expectation of affectionate reciprocation; but will honestly acknowledge that the prepossessions of my instinct oppose concessions; still will try to make myself subservient to your affectionate direction in all things, for I am fully impressed with the fallacious follies incubated from my conceptions.”

Isolita. “It is not my desire’s wish to have you subservient in any respect, but affectionate in the reciprocation of purity and goodness, so that our companionship may never admit of selfish deviation, but experience in daily appraisement the novelty of new ardor in loving returns.”

The voice of the padre, tremulous with mirthful enjoyment, interrupted the doctor’s grateful reply to Isolita, by calling upon him to act as umpire in deciding a question that had arisen between him and Madonnasta with regard to the germination of the bean. In answer to his call the doctor and Isolita advanced to his plot, where they joined in the voiceful mirth of Madonnasta, who had surprised her espoused while engaged in reversing the supposed resurrection of some Indian beans he had planted, which in germination had been forced in division above the surface. The first salutation of Madonnasta, when she discovered his unnatural occupation, was a look of startled inquiry directed to his face, to detect whether his employment was prompted by humorous suggestion from the delusive effects of his Christian education, which inculcated a material resurrection of the interred body, or simplicity. His pantomimic expression of disgust, at the supposed trifling of vegetation in returning to him his labors in material bifurcation, put to flight her first impressions that he was facetiously endeavoring to show his willingness to uproot old prejudices founded upon precedental habits and customs. His ludicrously despiteful gesticulations, evoked from nature’s supposed practical joke, quickly dispelled her shudder of dread by making apparent the real cause of the reversion. The simplicity of his ignorance caused a depreciating flow of mirth, as she stayed his hands from farther sacrilege. Readily understanding from her movements and facial indications, the cause of her remonstrance, he expostulated with her by signs and words to respect his judgment. But unable to stem the current of her mirthful resistance to his labors, he appealed to Dr. Baahar for judgment upon the cause of the bean’s bodily resurrection. Upon learning the cause of the doctor’s summons, Isolita was unable to resist her inclination to join in the mirthful peals of Madonnasta. But her socius with dignified seriousness, natural to the scientific professor, proceeded to give an elaborate opinion from authenticated authority founded upon the technicalities of order, genera, and species, in conjunction with a supposititious analysis of the soil; which caused the padre to interrupt him with the exclamation, “My goodness gracious, doctor, I called for light, and you give me darkness! The fact is we might as well acknowledge our ignorance at once, and submit gracefully to our betrothed’s Heraclean direction; for even your maiden aunt, upon whom you was mainly dependent for your theoretical ideas, illustrated the virtue of necessity in like emergency, by an example of celibacy, and the value of our opinions tend to the same end.”

To which the doctor replied, “If you are to be made the pons asinorum for the passage of Manatitlan wit, we had better adjourn to the auriculum where we can have a more direct rendering.”

In response to an implied allusion to his brogue, the padre, in retort, urged that the doctor’s name gave indication of an instinctive alliance equally remote with his own, although more simple and less prolonged in vocalization. These repartees, although civilized in evolution, were void in chivalrous results, as each party held themselves amenable to kindly goodwill in the revival of their ancient badinage in the presence of their betrothed.