fancy. These paths are dangerous, to be sure, leading as they do to the Castle of Indolence, where you may dream your life away and be none the wiser.
Yet there must be many who have so wandered regardless, and have wakened up too late to recapture the days they have lost in dreaming, if they ever do want to recapture them, which is doubtful. If we really intended happiness in life—as we do not ; what we intend, and ensure, too, for that matter, is excitement—but if we really intended happiness, here is where we should find it, in and about a farmyard as hangers-on. Not as the farmer, needless to say, to whose mind these olfactory stimuli arc stimulant, not anodyne. So that there can be no greater contrast than that between him and us. Every one knows how the idler idling irritates the worker working, And so we are brought back to reality all too soon by the slap of fate, waking up from a bank of thyme and dreams to the pavement of worry and hard work.
But it is sweet while it lasts, and if you can acquire, or are Incky enough to have been born with, pachydermia of the soul, then it may last for a lifetime—unless, that is to say, fate, as aforesaid, in the shape of the farmer, brings you back a-bump to earth with a clout on the side of the head and an order to take the hook and cut down thistles.
Stevenson has told us that idling is no loss of
