ous future, and pretend to be cheerful with the worm of
_ennui_ gnawing at your heart! In a word, the moment when it occurred to
you that yours is 'the common lot.' In that moment have you not
wished--do you not continually wish--for an exhaustless machine, a
machine that you could never get to the end of? Would you not give your
head to be lying on the flat of your back, peering with a candle, dirty,
foiled, catching cold--but absorbed in the pursuit of an object? Have
you not gloomily regretted that you were born without a mechanical turn,
because there is really something about a machine...?

It has never struck you that you do possess a machine! Oh, blind! Oh,
dull! It has never struck you that you have at hand a machine wonderful
beyond all mechanisms in sheds, intricate, delicately adjustable, of
astounding and miraculous possibilities, interminably interesting! That
machine is yourself. 'This fellow is preaching. I won't have it!' you
exclaim resentfully. Dear sir, I am not preaching, and, even if I were,
I think you _would_ have it. I think I can anyhow keep hold of your
button for a while, though you pull hard. I am not preaching. I am
simply bent on calling your attention to a fact which has perhaps wholly
or partially escaped you--namely, that you are the most fascinating bit
of machinery that ever was. You do yourself less than justice. It is
said that men are only interested in themselves. The truth is that, as a
rule, men are interested in every mortal thing except themselves. They
have a habit of taking themselves for granted, and that habit is
responsible for nine-tenths of the boredom and despair on the face of
the planet.

A man will wake up in the middle of the night (usually owing to some
form of delightful excess), and his brain will be very active indeed for
a space ere he can go to sleep again. In that candid hour, after the
exaltation of the evening and before the hope of the dawn, he will see
everything in its true colours--except himself. There is nothing like a
sleepless couch for a clear vision of one's environment. He will see all
his wife's faults and the hopelessness of trying to cure them. He will
momentarily see, though with less sharpness of outline, his own faults.
He will probably decide that the anxieties of children outweigh the joys
connected with children. He will admit all the shortcomings of
existence, will face them like a man, grimly, sourly, in a sturdy
despair. He will mutt