on five thousand a year because their minds are fixed upon that
distant time when they hope to enjoy life on twenty thousand a year. And
if ever they attain that twenty thousand they will not enjoy it either;
but will merely peer forward to a hypothetical enjoyment at fifty thousand
a year. And this is the essence of their tragedy:--they have not learned
to wait with happiness.

Is there any reason for this inordinate ambition to "get on"? Louis
Stevenson was happier, as a small boy with a bull's-eye lantern at his
belt, than any king upon his throne. The secret of enjoyment is to learn
to look about us, to value what our destiny has given us, to transform it
into magic by some contributory gift of poetry or humor, to consider with
contentment the lilies of the field. The zest of life is in the living of
it; and "to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive."

How often, in the roaring and tumultuary tide of life, we meet a man who
sighs, "If only I could have a single day in which there was nothing that
I had to do, nothing even that I had to think of, how happy I should be!"
and yet this self-same man, if set down at a railway junction, will at
once bestir himself to seek something to think of, something to do, and
will spurn the gift of leisure. The incessant hurry of our current life
has tragically lured us to forget the art of loitering. We are no longer
able--like Wordsworth, on his "old gray stone"--to sit upon a trunk at
some railway junction of our lives and listen reverently to the "mighty
sum of things forever speaking."

One of the loveliest women I have ever known--the late Alison
Cunningham--told me a little anecdote of the author of _The
Lantern-Bearers_ which, so far as I know, has never yet been published.
When little Louis was about five years old, he did something naughty, and
Cummy stood him up in a corner and told him he would have to stay there
for ten minutes. Then she left the room. At the end of the allotted
period, she returned and said, "Time's up, Master Lou: you may come out
now." But the little boy stood motionless in his penitential corner.
"That's enough: time's up," repeated Cummy. And then the child mystically
raised his hand, and with a strange light in his eyes, "Hush...," he said,
"I'm telling myself a story...."

And, in the _Christian Morals_ of Sir Thomas Browne, we may read the
following passage:--"He who must needs have company, must needs have
sometimes bad company.