cket--"I get no rest."

"What a bad habit!"

"Isn't almost everything we do a bad habit? Have we ever a humor that
recurs to us, that is not a bad habit? Are not the simple things
which mean nothing in themselves an evil influence when they grow into
requirements and make slaves of us? I suppose it was a bad habit that
made me a bad sleeper, and I turn to another bad habit to correct it.
The only things which are positively bad habits are those that require
an effort to sustain, or will break down under us without we struggle
to support them. To be morose is not one jot a worse habit than to
be agreeable; for the time will come when you are indisposed to be
pleasant, and the company in which you find yourself are certain to deem
the humor as an offence to themselves; but there is a worse habit than
this, which is to go on talking to a man whose eyes are closing with
sleep. Good-night."

Maitland said no more than the truth when he declared how happy he found
himself in that quiet unmolested existence which he led at Lyle Abbey.
To be free in every way, to indulge his humor to be alone or in company,
to go and come as he liked, were great boons; but they were even less
than the enjoyment he felt in living amongst total strangers,--persons
who had never known, never heard of him, for whom he was not called on
to make any effort or support any character.

No man ever felt more acutely the slavery that comes of sustaining
a part before the world, and being as strange and as inexplicable as
people required he should be. While a very young man, it amused him to
trifle in this fashion, and to set absurd modes afloat for imitation;
and he took a certain spiteful pleasure in seeing what a host of
followers mere eccentricity could command. As he grew older, he wearied
of this, and, to be free of it, wandered away to distant and unvisited
countries, trying the old and barren experiment whether new sensations
might not make a new nature. _Caelum non animum mutant_, says the adage;
and he came back pretty much as he went, with this only difference, that
he now cared only for quietness and repose. Not the contemplative
repose of one who sought to reflect without disturbance, so much as the
peaceful isolation that suited indolence. He fancied how he would have
liked to be the son of that house, and dream away life in that wild
secluded spot; but, after all, the thought was like the epicure's notion
of how contented he could be wit