cages.

It is true I had my Sundays to myself; but Sundays, admirable as the
institution of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very
reason the very worst adapted for days of unbending and recreation. In
particular, there is a gloom for me attendant upon a city Sunday, a
weight in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, the music, and
the ballad-singers--the buzz and stirring murmur of the streets. Those
eternal bells depress me. The closed shops repel me. Prints, pictures,
all the glittering and endless succession of knacks and gewgaws,
and ostentatiously displayed wares of tradesmen, which make a
week-day saunter through the less busy parts of the metropolis so
delightful--are shut out. No book-stalls deliciously to idle over--No
busy faces to recreate the idle man who contemplates them ever passing
by--the very face of business a charm by contrast to his temporary
relaxation from it. Nothing to be seen but unhappy countenances--or
half-happy at best--of emancipated 'prentices and little trades-folks,
with here and there a servant maid that has got leave to go out, who,
slaving all the week, with the habit has lost almost the capacity of
enjoying a free hour; and livelily expressing the hollowness of a
day's pleasuring. The very strollers in the fields on that day look
anything but comfortable.

But besides Sundays I had a day at Easter, and a day at Christmas,
with a full week in the summer to go and air myself in my native
fields of Hertfordshire. This last was a great indulgence; and the
prospect of its recurrence, I believe, alone kept me up through the
year, and made my durance tolerable. But when the week came round, did
the glittering phantom of the distance keep touch with me? or rather
was it not a series of seven uneasy days, spent in restless pursuit
of pleasure, and a wearisome anxiety to find out how to make the most
of them? Where was the quiet, where the promised rest? Before I had a
taste of it, it was vanished. I was at the desk again, counting upon
the fifty-one tedious weeks that must intervene before such another
snatch would come. Still the prospect of its coming threw something of
an illumination upon the darker side of my captivity. Without it, as I
have said, I could scarcely have sustained my thraldom.

Independently of the rigours of attendance, I have ever been haunted
with a sense (perhaps a mere caprice) of incapacity for business.
This, during my latter years, had inc