On the twenty-ninth of the month, Miss Rachel and Mr. Franklin hit on

a new method of working their way together through the time which might

otherwise have hung heavy on their hands. There are reasons for taking

particular notice here of the occupation that amused them. You will find

it has a bearing on something that is still to come.

Gentlefolks in general have a very awkward rock ahead in life--the

rock ahead of their own idleness. Their lives being, for the most part,

passed in looking about them for something to do, it is curious to

see--especially when their tastes are of what is called the intellectual

sort--how often they drift blindfold into some nasty pursuit. Nine

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times out of ten they take to torturing something, or to spoiling

something--and they firmly believe they are improving their minds, when

the plain truth is, they are only making a mess in the house. I have

seen them (ladies, I am sorry to say, as well as gentlemen) go out,

day after day, for example, with empty pill-boxes, and catch newts, and

beetles, and spiders, and frogs, and come home and stick pins through

the miserable wretches, or cut them up, without a pang of remorse, into

little pieces. You see my young master, or my young mistress, poring

over one of their spiders' insides with a magnifying-glass; or you meet

one of their frogs walking downstairs without his head--and when you

wonder what this cruel nastiness means, you are told that it means

a taste in my young master or my young mistress for natural history.

Sometimes, again, you see them occupied for hours together in spoiling

a pretty flower with pointed instruments, out of a stupid curiosity

to know what the flower is made of. Is its colour any prettier, or its

scent any sweeter, when you DO know? But there! the poor souls must get

through the time, you see--they must get through the time. You dabbled

in nasty mud, and made pies, when you were a child; and you dabble in

nasty science, and dissect spiders, and spoil flowers, when you grow up.

In the one case and in the other, the secret of it is, that you have got

nothing to think of in your poor empty head, and nothing to do with your

poor idle hands. And so it ends in your spoiling canvas with paints, and

making a smell in the house; or in keeping tadpoles in a glass box full

of dirty water, and turning everybody's stomach in the house; or in

chipping off bits of stone here, there, and everywhere, and dropping

grit into all the victuals in the house; or in staining your fingers

in the pursuit of photography, and doing justice without mercy on

everybody's face in the house. It often falls heavy enough, no doubt, on

people who are really obliged to get their living, to be forced to work

for the clothes that cover them, the roof that shelters them, and the

food that keeps them going. But compare the hardest day's work you

ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into

spiders' stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something

it MUST think of, and your hands something that they MUST do.




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