ing,
drinking, and making love as they did before the Flood or the French
Revolution; and the old shepherd telling his tale under the hawthorn.

Extreme _busyness_, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a
symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a
catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a
sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious
of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring
these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will
see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity;
they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not
take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and
unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand
still. It is no good speaking to such folk; they _cannot_ be idle, their
nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of
coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When
they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and
have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If
they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid
trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was
nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were
paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in
their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of
the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they
had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed
with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own
affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin with, they have
dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until
here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all
material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while
they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered
on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but
now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits
bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to
me as being Success in Life.

But it is not only the person himself who suffers from his busy habits,
but his wif