y and a quiet
mind?

So reasoned Graygown with her

"most silver flow
Of subtle-paced counsel in distress."

And, according to her word, so did we. That lazy, idle brook became to
us one of the best of friends; the pathfinder of happiness on many a
bright summer day; and, through long vacations, the faithful encourager
of indolence.

Indolence in the proper sense of the word, you understand. The meaning
which is commonly given to it, as Archbishop Trench pointed out in his
suggestive book about WORDS AND THEIR USES, is altogether false. To
speak of indolence as if it were a vice is just a great big verbal
slander.

Indolence is a virtue. It comes from two Latin words, which mean freedom
from anxiety or grief. And that is a wholesome state of mind. There are
times and seasons when it is even a pious and blessed state of mind. Not
to be in a hurry; not to be ambitious or jealous or resentful; not
to feel envious of anybody; not to fret about to-day nor worry about
to-morrow,--that is the way we ought all to feel at some time in our
lives; and that is the kind of indolence in which our brook faithfully
encouraged us.

'T is an age in which such encouragement is greatly needed. We have
fallen so much into the habit of being always busy that we know not how
nor when to break it off with firmness. Our business tags after us into
the midst of our pleasures, and we are ill at ease beyond reach of the
telegraph and the daily newspaper. We agitate ourselves amazingly
about a multitude of affairs,--the politics of Europe, the state of the
weather all around the globe, the marriages and festivities of very rich
people, and the latest novelties in crime, none of which are of vital
interest to us. The more earnest souls among us are cultivating
a vicious tendency to Summer Schools, and Seaside Institutes of
Philosophy, and Mountaintop Seminaries of Modern Languages.

We toil assiduously to cram something more into those scrap-bags of
knowledge which we fondly call our minds. Seldom do we rest tranquil
long enough to find out whether there is anything in them already that
is of real value,--any native feeling, any original thought, which would
like to come out and sun itself for a while in quiet.

For my part, I am sure that I stand more in need of a deeper sense of
contentment with life than of a knowledge of the Bulgarian tongue, and
that all the paradoxes of Hegel would not do me so much good as one ho