joy of getting out
of the harness that makes a horse fling up his heels, and gallop around
the field, and roll over and over in the grass, when he is turned loose
in the pasture. It is the impulse of pure play that makes a little
bunch of wild ducks chase one another round and round on the water, and
follow their leader in circles and figures of eight; there is no
possible use in it, but it gratifies their instinct of freedom and
makes them feel that they are not mere animal automata, whatever the
natural history men may say to the contrary. It is the sense of release
that a man experiences when he unbuckles the straps of his knapsack,
and lays it down under a tree, and says 'You stay there till I come
back for you! I'm going to rest myself by climbing this hill, just
because it is not on the road-map, and because there is nothing at the
top of it except the view.'

"It is this feeling of escape," he continued, in the tone of a man who
has shaken off the harness of polite conversation and let himself go
for a gallop around the field of monologue, "it is just this
exhilarating sense of liberation that is lacking in most of our social
amusements and recreations. They are dictated by fashion and directed
by routine. Men get into the so-called 'round of pleasure,' and they
are driven into a trot to keep up with it, just as if it were a
treadmill. The only difference is that the pleasure-mill grinds no
corn. Harry Bellairs was complaining to me, the other day, that after
an exhausting season of cotillons in New York, he had been running his
motor-car through immense fatigues in France and Italy, and had
returned barely in time to do his duty by his salmon-river in Canada,
work his new boat through the annual cruise of the yacht club, finish
up a round of house-parties at Bar Harbor and Lenox, and get ready for
the partridge-shooting in England with his friend the Duke of
Bangham,--it was a dog's life, he said, and he had no time to himself
at all. I rather pitied him; he looked so frayed. It seems to me that
the best way for a man or a woman of pleasure to get a day off would be
to do a little honest work.

"You see it is the change that makes the charm of a day off. The real
joy of leisure is known only to the people who have contracted the
habit of work without becoming enslaved to the vice of overwork.

"A hobby is the best thing in the world for a man with a serious
vocation. It keeps him from getting muscle-bound in