eople who were peeping, as they toiled,
grimy and sweat-stained, from the open windows, would choose this life
rather than the other, and would have condemned the life of the country
as dull. Was it he, Hugh wondered, or they that were out of joint?
Ought he to accept the ordinary, sensible point of view, and try to
conform himself to it, crush down his love for trees and open fields
and smiling waters? The sociable, herding instinct was as true, as
God-sent an instinct as his own pleasure in free solitude; and the old
adage that God made the country but man the town was as patently absurd
as to say that God made the iceberg, but the ant made the ant-heap.

He went to his club, a place which he rarely entered; it was full of
brisk and cheerful men, lunching with relish; some of them had hurried
in from their work, and were enjoying the hour of leisure; some were
the old frequenters of the place, men whose work in the world was over,
as well as men who had never known what it was to work. But these men,
even some who seemed crippled with age and infirmity, seemed as intent
upon their pleasures, as avid of news, as eager for conversation, as
particular about their food, as if their existence was of a supreme and
weighty importance, Hugh watched an elderly man, whom he knew by name,
who was said to be the most unoccupied man in London, who was
administering food and drink to himself with a serious air of delicate
zest, as though he were presiding benevolently at some work of charity
and mercy. He had certainly flourished on his idleness like a green
bay tree! Hugh was inclined to believe in the necessity to happiness
of the observance of some primal laws, like the law of labour, but here
was a contradiction to all his theories. He sighed to think of the
mountains of carefully prepared food that this rosy, well-brushed
person must have consumed in the course of his life! He was a
notoriously selfish man, who never laid out a penny except on his own
needs and pleasures. Yet here was he, guarded like the apple of God's
eye, and all the good things that the earth held--ease, comfort,
independence, health, honour, and the power of enjoyment--were heaped
upon him with a liberal hand. No wonder he thought so well of the
world! Hugh had heard him say, with an air of virtuous complacency,
that he was generally pretty comfortable.

Hugh did not grudge his luxurious ease to the great statesman who sate
in the corner, with