The problem is that in many cases when you quit it doesn’t just mean you don’t continue to go forward often times you go backwards. And the reasons sometimes seem valid, we are tired, we aren’t seeing the benefits soon enough, we see a better opportunity, we are criticized or we just don’t want to do it anymore. We quit our efforts to improve ourselves, we quit relationships, we quit our jobs. We know that, but many of us still quit when we should keep working at whatever it is we are working at. We have lived our lives long enough to have discovered the reality that we won’t accomplish a lot in this life if we quit too soon. But really, most of us know that already.

From Mayzie we learn the cost of quitting while from Horton we discover the reward of persistence. (Read from “But at that very instant, the egg burst apart” to End of the book)Īnd there are really two lessons that we discover in the book. She seems mildly amused that Horton is still sitting on the silly egg until the egg begins to hatch and then we pick up the story again. And it is when the circus stops in Palm Beach that Mayzie re-enters the story. Now if we were to continue to read the story we would discover how Horton was captured by hunters and that he and the tree, and the nest and the egg were sold to a circus, where people paid to see an elephant sitting in a tree. In the part that I read this morning you were introduced to the two main character’s Horton the Elephant and Mayzie the bird.

Is the book familiar to anyone? This was one of Seuss’s first books, it was published for the first time in 1940, fourteen years before the sequel, and it was one of the books that my parents read to me when I was little. Yep this is the same Horton who Heard a Who, and this is where we first hear his philosophy “I meant what I said and I said what I meant, an elephant is faithful one hundred percent.” (Read from beginning to page with animal friends running away)

Horton egg