The Pumpkin and the Acorn.
A LEARNED man lived in France who boasted in his not believing in the being of a God. One day as he was lying in the shade under a large oak tree, and looking at a pumpkin, which was growing in a garden close by, he shook his head and said “The world could not be made by a great and wise God, for if it were, the small acorn would not grow on the oak tree, and the large pumpkin on so small a plant. If I made the world, I should change places with the pumpkin and the acorn!” Whilst the foolish man was puffing himself up with conceit, and thinking himself wiser than the Maker of the earth, the sun, and the stars, an acorn fell from the oak tree, and gave him such a sharp blow on the nose as to make it bleed. “Oh! what a fool I am,” said the astonished man, “I have received a crack on my nose for my folly, and it is well for me that pumpkins do not grow on oak trees; for if they did, my nose would be smashed, or perhaps my skull broken. I now see that I am wrong and nature is right. I will never again say there is no God.”