.
There is a brief glimpse of a downcast face looking as though it had just
chanted the Dies Irae through the mouthfuls of a hurried breakfast; and
once more this laggard is passed in the day's race towards the higher
peak. The reproof goes home. It justly humiliates. But the weather is
only a little west of south for one of the last fair days of the year;
and the gloom of the yew in the churchyard--which stands over the obscure
headstone of a man named Puplett--that yew which seems the residue of the
dark past, has its antiquity full of little smouldering embers of new
life again; and so a lazy man has reasons to doubt whether the millennium
is worth all this hurry. As it is, we seem to have as much trouble as
there is time to classify before supper; by which time, from the look of
the weather, there will be more. Then why hurry over it? The tombstone
says Puplett was a "thrifty and industrious parent," and I can see what
happened to him in 1727. What would I not give, I ask myself, as I pause
by the yew, and listen to the aeroplanes overhead, for a few words from
this Puplett on thrift, industry, and progress! Does he now know more
than brigadiers?

It may be that what Europe is suffering from in our time is the
consequence of having worked too hard, since that unlucky day when Watt
gave too much thought to a boiling kettle. We have worked too hard
without knowing why we were doing it, or what our work would do with us.
We were never wise enough to loaf properly, to stop and glance casually
around for our bearings. We went blindly on. Consider the newspapers, as
they are now! A casual inspection of the mixture of their hard and
congested sentences is enough to show that what is wanted by our writers
famous for their virility, their power of "graphic description" as their
outpour is called by their disciples, and their knowledge of what
everybody ought to be doing, is perhaps no more than an occasional
bromide. They would feel better for a long sleep. This direction by them
of our destiny is an intoxicating pursuit, but it is as exhausting as
would be any other indulgence. We might do quite well if they would only
leave it to us. But they will never believe it. Ah! the Great Men of
Action! What the world has suffered from their inspired efforts to
shepherd humanity into worried flocks hurrying nobody knew whither, every
schoolboy reads; and our strong men to-day, without whose names and
portraits no periodical is consi