the second stage is the more peaceful. A man
does not make so many articles towards the end, nor does he laugh aloud;
but the purely animal pleasures, the sense of physical wellbeing, the
delight of every inhalation, of every time the muscles tighten down the
thigh, console him for the absence of the others, and bring him to his
destination still content.

Nor must I forget to say a word on bivouacs. You come to a milestone on
a hill, or some place where deep ways meet under trees; and off goes the
knapsack, and down you sit to smoke a pipe in the shade. You sink into
yourself, and the birds come round and look at you; and your smoke
dissipates upon the afternoon under the blue dome of heaven; and the sun
lies warm upon your feet, and the cool air visits your neck and turns
aside your open shirt. If you are not happy, you must have an evil
conscience. You may dally as long as you like by the roadside. It is
almost as if the millennium were arrived, when we shall throw our
clocks and watches over the housetop, and remember time and seasons no
more. Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live
for ever. You have no idea, unless you have tried it, how endlessly long
is a summer's day that you measure out only by hunger, and bring to an
end only when you are drowsy. I know a village where there are hardly
any clocks, where no one knows more of the days of the week than by a
sort of instinct for the fete on Sundays, and where only one person can
tell you the day of the month, and she is generally wrong; and if people
were aware how slow Time journeyed in that village, and what armfuls of
spare hours he gives, over and above the bargain, to its wise
inhabitants, I believe there would be a stampede out of London,
Liverpool, Paris, and a variety of large towns, where the clocks lose
their heads, and shake the hours out each one faster than the other, as
though they were all in a wager. And all these foolish pilgrims would
each bring his own misery along with him, in a watch-pocket! It is to be
noticed there were no clocks and watches in the much-vaunted days before
the flood. It follows, of course, there were no appointments, and
punctuality was not yet thought upon. "Though ye take from a covetous
man all his treasure," says Milton, "he has yet one jewel left; ye
cannot deprive him of his covetousness." And so I would say of a modern
man of business, you may do what you will for him, put him in Eden, give